University Rankings: Globalisation stimulus

Earlier last month (May) Peking University played host to perhaps the grandest global gathering ever of the higher-education business. Senior figures from the world’s most famous universities — Harvard and Yale, Oxford and Cambridge among them — enjoyed or endured a two-hour opening ceremony followed by a packed programme of mandatory cultural events interspersed with speeches lauding ‘Xi Jinping thought’. The party was thrown to celebrate Peking University’s 120th birthday and less explicitly, China’s success in a race that started 20 years ago. In May 1998 Jiang Zemin, China’s president at the time, announced Project 985, named for the year and the month. Its purpose was to create world-class universities. Nian Cai Liu, a professor of polymeric materials science and engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, got swept up in this initiative. “I asked myself many questions, including: what is the definition of and criteria for a world-class university? What are the positions of top Chinese universities?”  Once he started benchmarking them against foreign institutions, he found that “governments, universities and stakeholders from all around the world” were interested. So, in 2003, he produced the first ranking of 500 leading global institutions. Nobody, least of all the modest Prof. Liu, expected the Shanghai rankings to be so popular. “Indeed, it was a real surprise,” he says. People are suckers for league tables, be they of wealth, beauty, fame — or institutions of higher education. University rankings don’t just feed humanity’s competitive urges. They are also an important source of consumer intelligence about a good on which people spend huge amounts of time and money, and about which precious little other information is available. Hence the existence of national league tables, such as US News & World Report’s ranking of American universities. But the creation of global league tables — there are now around 20, with Shanghai, the Times Higher Education (THE) and QS the most important — took competition to a new level. It set not just universities, but governments, against each other. When the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings were first published, the “knowledge economy” was emerging in the global consciousness. Governments realised that great universities were no longer just sources of cultural pride and finishing schools for the children of the well-off, but the engines of future prosperity — generators of human capital, of ideas and of innovative companies. Propelled by a combination of national pride and economic pragmatism, the idea spread swiftly that this was a global competition in which all self-respecting countries should take part. Thirty-one rich and middle-income countries have announced an excellence initiative of some sort. India, where world rankings were once regarded with post-colonial disdain, is the latest to join the race: in 2016 the finance minister announced that 20 institutions would aim to become world-class universities. The most generously funded initiatives are in France, China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The most unrealistic targets are Nigeria’s, to get at least two universities in the world’s Top 200, and Russia’s, to get five in…