The Higher Education Institutions (HEI) ranking ecosystem’s affective response that creates emotive policy motion has chartered the course of India’s higher education policy landscape in an unprecedented manner. The resultant three-dimensional pursuit of critical stakeholders leadership chasing rankings, faculty chasing publications and students chasing placements has converted the intellectually competitive dynamics of HEIs into an annual branding contest.
This has created a sticky racing track in which the HEI racers engage in mindless pace to reach the goalpost only to realise that the goalposts themselves are running a race. Global ranking agencies—THE/QS/Shanghai AWRU, Nature Index, National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), media rankings, etc—themselves are positioning each as the benchmark for excellence. Policy decisions are based on HEIs’ place in such global rankings or NIRF. This has raised a fundamental question on the foundational basis of long-term policies being tested on short-term (annual) ranking race outcome.
The undercurrents of the world university rankings are so strong that they short-circuit the policy narrative on creating world-class universities (WCU) so much that it’s a proxy to WCU. In the words of renowned educationist and researcher Philip Altbach, “Every country wants a world-class university. No country feels it can do without one. The problem is that no one knows what a world-class university is, and no one has figured out how to get one.” Finances topped the list of serious requirements to build a WCU.
According to a World Bank report, establishing a WCU in the late 19th century required $50 million and 200 years. The University of Chicago in the beginning of the 20th century invested 20 years and more than $100 million to build a WCU. The Cornell University spent more than $750 million in setting up a world-class medical school in Qatar in 2002. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia was established at $3 billion and operates outside the purview of the Ministry of Higher Education.
The allocation of Rs 1,000 crore to each Institution of Eminence in the next five years can only be an appetiser but never a sumptuous budget for becoming a WCU. Many institutions find their own ways of raising financial resources in their quest for becoming an WCU. However, the cautionary signal remains bright and staring—can rankings be seen as a proxy to progress driving the policy narrative?
A quick comparison of the most popular global rankings easily highlights the inherent bias that incapacitates Indian HEIs to get their fair representation despite their consistent marching progress. Factors like international faculty/students, research outcome metrics, ‘reputation’, etc are necessary but not sufficient to put in place a largely accepted methodology. This resulted in some IITs staying away from one ranking agency but embracing the other while the other IITs did the vice-versa.
Be that as it may, still over 98 percent of India’s HEIs will be outside the global ranking orbit considering the status quo. Policy making is about the graded progress of the remaining 98 percent with more focus on regional and national varieties of rankings and ratings. The NIRF has been an excellent national accommodative response to an exclusive global pattern. The NIRF has in the last five years changed the racing track surface to contextualise the ground realities. Though it has its own limitations, it has seen a good start so far with its own policy ammunition to benchmark it as the Regional Ranking Leader, to begin with South Asia.
Despite the evolutionary ranking process, global or regional or national, it has seen its own rounds of pranking. HEIs finding loopholes and other marketing gimmicks to improve perception, etc. The velocity with which ranking is gaining speed and overtaking accreditation (ratings) in the last 10 years may push the policy discourse more towards ranking and not accreditation. Indian HEIs’ progress in the last two decades was predominantly catalysed by accreditation, driven by NBA and NAAC. Both stood, are standing and will stand as the twin-towers of academic franking, stamping the excellence of HEIs. In the current budgetary constraints, policy-making should embrace accreditation (ratings) and rankings (NIRF) in good mix to find a good balance that addresses ‘issues’ of ranking, pranking and franking of universities.
S Vaidhyasubramaniam
vaidhya@sastra.edu
Vice-Chancellor, SASTRA Deemed University