Global ranking harmful to local varsities

A few days ago newspapers published the now common universities ranking, which ostensibly offers guidance on which ones in a particular region are better than others.

The importance of the ranking is clearly seen in how they are consumed and appropriated by universities across the world.

Universities ranked high gloriously proclaim their victories and re-publish them on websites, newspapers and often use the information as part of their marketing.

Our universities claim merits from the rankings with self-congratulation by shrinking the scope down to a region, thus announcing they are among the top in Africa or in Kenya.

These events remind us of the proverbial pygmy drawing comparisons with fellow pygmies to make claims of height advantage. Of course, it masks the reality that they all are pygmies.

But the main reason why these rankings must be questioned is because of their poor methodology, often seen through their use of arbitrary weighting and the huge discrepancies in the different rankings.

There are three main global groups that publish university rankings every year.

The most common and perhaps the oldest is the China-based Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).

This ranking was designed by the Chinese authorities for their universities to benchmark on institutions in the West.

Their methodology is straight-forward. It ranks universities based on the number of Nobel Laureates it has and the number of publications a university has published in either the Nature or Science journal.

Period. In these research-based surveys only ranking the arts, humanities and social sciences do not count.

The Spanish Web Ranking of Universities, published a few days ago is also becoming influential globally.

It is based on a number of web-based factors such as the volume of the web contents, the visibility of web publications, repositories and their perceived impact. In short, it quantifies web visibility.

NOT WORTHY

Thus, a university’s worth is reduced to the presence of its research output that is available on the web.

This ranking has had some adverse effects on our local universities.

First it has made hundreds of ‘local journals’ that have no web presence invisible, delegitimised and essentially worthless.

Second, it is pushing universities to load thousands of publications most of which have not been peer reviewed into the web.

The other popular ranking is the UK-based Times Higher Education rank (THE). Unlike the other two, this ranking attempts to measure both research and teaching capacity.

Alongside surveys on teaching quality, this rank counts the number of citations a research article in a specific university gets.

This means that a mediocre but a widely cited publication will rank higher than a quality, high impact research that has been less cited.

An obvious shortcoming of all these rankings is that they reduce the complexity of higher education to some imagined linear hierarchy rather than on social or personal change.

In other words, the rankings do not tell us anything about how universities are an agent of personal growth education, where an all round personality is nurtured.

As such, the rankings are based on what can be measured and not on what is actually relevant or important to parents, students or the country as a whole.

LOCAL FORMAT
Since rankings are not subject specific, it is impossible for a prospective student to use rankings to select any university based on them.

Worse, the obsession with topping any of these rankings means that local universities have resorted to short term, cosmetic adjustments, rather than exploring deeper issues within their own systems.

While these rankings are important in prompting discussions on how we compare with the best in the world, they should not blind us to the reality of our universities.

The Commission of University Education should consider designing a “locally relevant” assessment system that helps stakeholders in decision-making and one that encourages universities to invest in specific research domains.

Dr Omanga is a Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge, and lectures in Media Studies at Moi University; [email protected]