A Utilitarian View of Rankings

July 1, 2013

During a session at NAFSA’S 2012 Annual Conference, Phil Baty, editor of world university rankings for Times Higher Education, outlined the basic methodology of THE’s annually published rankings, which evaluate universities based on performance indicators grouped in five areas: teaching, research, citations, industry income, and international outlook. In his discussion, Baty concentrated on the rankings’ attention to reputation, which is estimated by a survey of invited experts, such as faculty with publication records. The results are interesting, if also predictable. The big names of higher education dominate the top 50: Harvard, MIT, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge, for instance. It is a portfolio of the top brands in higher education, all with high name recognition.

So why should reputation and rankings matter to international educators? Brands and reputation influence an individual’s decisions. They influence young people’s decisions about where to study, including decisions about where to be an “international student” seeking a degree or diploma, and where to study abroad in order to enrich a program of study. In either case, individual decisions aggregate to a point that is fiscally and programmatically significant for institutions. In the case of international students, they aggregate to a point where the decisions are economically significant for nations and systems of higher education. This is true for host nations such as Australia and the United Kingdom, and for “sending nations,” such as Morocco, which has a huge student and graduate diaspora.