September 2021 – View From A Bridge – management, education and personal thoughts

Is a new Dark Age beckoning for higher education take up?

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece First published in University World News, 29 September 2021

Many believe that going to university is a rite of passage and that young people and their parents will always make sacrifices for it.

For years the Grand Tour of Europe was similarly considered an educational and social milestone for young, privileged men to complete their education, but its attraction waned.

When technology made rail and sea travel accessible, Thomas Cook aggregated tourists on package holidays and rich young men lost their interest in neo-classical culture: the Grand Tour gave way to the “Cook’s Tour”.

Enabling technology, applicant aggregation and a growing dissatisfaction with educational outcomes are with us today. There is no reason that one generation’s rite of passage won’t become another’s dead-end junction and some warning signs are already showing.

It is possible to speculate on how the educational enlightenment of the past 70 years could mark the beginnings of a new dark age.

It’s just not worth it

A February 2021 House of Commons Briefing in the UK showed part-time entrants to university had collapsed from 470,000 in 2009/10 to 235,000 in 2019/20. The number of “white working-class boys” going to university continued to fall in 2021, with acceptances down 9.9% since 2014.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, higher education enrolment has fallen by an average of 1.67% per year since 2010.

Rumblings of discontent have been tracked in the US, with the Pew Research Center and Gallup finding declining confidence in higher education since 2015.

Some parts of the political spectrum are markedly more sceptical than others, but even where there is support, it has fallen in recent years.

A survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center and Association of American Colleges and Universities found that 29% of US adults did not think a college degree was “worth it”.

A OnePoll survey of UK postgraduates in 2021 found 46% did not think their university education was worth the money and over 30% did not need a degree to do their current job.

The Harris Poll in 2020 found 60% of student loan debtors in the US said their degree was not worth the student loan debt they had taken on. Whether it is the general public or the graduating class – scepticism is evident and increasing.

Government views are also shifting with the UK removing the long term ambition of 50% of young people participating in higher education and calling it an “absurd mantra”.

When an education minister says that university education is not what the individual or country needs, is “low value” and carries an “inbuilt snobbishness” it is difficult to see why the public should keep the faith.

All at a time when young people are graduating into a post-pandemic world which has brought new uncertainty to their first steps on the career ladder.

Zombie Gen Z to the Alpha Dawn

Generational shifts take time and if the average age of a new parent is around 28, we are seeing the last of Generation X’s (1965 to 1980) children going to higher education.

Those parents, along with the media and successive governments, told Gen Z (1997 to 2012) that a degree was the route to a career and a better life. Maybe that is why Gen Z didn’t question the aspirational mindset society encouraged when university was effectively free in the UK and you could even get a grant to cover living costs.

But the last of the Millennials, Gen Y (1981 to 1996), are finding out that traditional graduate industries are embracing the digital revolution and squeezing out many of the first steps on the career ladder. Economic indicators point to young people today being worse off than their parents, unable to get into the housing market and reliant on the bank of mum and dad until well into their twenties. There is no reason to believe that the situation is going to improve any time soon.

Gen A (born from 2012), the children of Millennials, will be at undergraduate entry age around 2030, just as the demographic boom of the 2020s starts to go against UK universities.

A disenchanted Gen Y might be regretting the return on their own education investment and could advise Gen A to consider one of the many different paths available to them.

The bank of grandad and grandma (Gen X) will not stretch far enough to have much influence as health costs rise, life expectancy increases and the Asian century shifts the world’s economic centre of gravity.

Government is unlikely to help, as unpaid student debt in the UK is already £160 billion and forecast to grow to £560bn by 2050.

The Higher Education Policy Institute or HEPI has already suggested that students should start paying back their loans at a lower income threshold, which looks like both a cost saving to Government and an acceptance that graduate earnings are going nowhere fast.

Alternatively, the Augar recommendations could be adopted in full and domestic tuition fees slashed from £9,000 to £7,500, but even if this does come to pass Gen A could face the prospect of graduating with a large amount of student debt, that they start paying off earlier, at interest rates higher than today’s historic lows.

Right now, in the UK you seem to have more chance of driving a lorry than you do of obtaining a place on a graduate training scheme.

Much has been written about the “Future of Work” becoming more skilled by 2030, probably sooner. Whilst there is much evidence pointing towards a demand for graduate skills as a result of the fourth industrial revolution, what’s to say you cannot be trained on the job by your employer whilst earning, as opposed to taking three or four years out of the workforce to go to university?

Logistics companies, for instance, are likely to be willing to train people on the job and do a deal with Coursera or the next generation of online operators to upskill young people.

With the chance of learning a skill, having their education paid for and earning three years’ salary, the attraction of university life may be less evident to Gen A, particularly when they have grown up being told that employers see online degrees as the equal of in-person study.

Perceptions of degrees as the only gateway to a world of opportunity and a comfortable income may also come under increasing pressure. Research by the Higher Education Statistics Agency or HESA and Warwick University has suggested that in the UK, on average, graduates born in 1970 (GenX) earned 19% more than non-graduates by the age of 26, compared to graduates born in 1990 (GenY) who only earned 11% more.

The UK’s Office for National Statistics or ONS says that 36.6% of all graduates but 45.4% of recent graduates (a figure that rises to 59% in Liverpool) are working in non-graduate jobs while, in the US, it is estimated that 33.8% of all graduates are in jobs not requiring a degree.

28 years later

It may seem fanciful to look even further forward, towards what generational changes may have occurred by 2045, but it is already 24 years since Tony Blair’s pledge to make university a reality for 50% of young people in the UK.

Society seemed in favour of the idea at the time, but by 2010 the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR), whose 750 employer members recruited 30,000 graduates a year, was already calling for the target to be scrapped because it devalued degrees.

The current Government’s rejection of the target may be a watershed moment that reverses the trend for the coming 25 years.

It all leads to an intriguing and troubling proposition. A major indicator that someone will go to university is that at least one of their parents did, but if parents begin to counsel their children against attending we will be heading into totally new territory and a possible downward spiral.

University-educated parents actively briefing their children against going to university would be a cultural disruptor that makes full-time, in-person university attendance the exception rather than the norm.

Louise Nicol is founder of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD. Alan Preece is an expert in global education, business transformation and operational management and runs the blogging site View from a Bridge.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

International students: UK must make hay while the sun shines

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece First printed in University World News 18 September 2021

Champagne glasses were raised at the PIEoneer Awards in London’s Guildhall on 3 September, a sparkling event where many higher education colleagues were able to mingle face to face in the United Kingdom for the first time in almost two years. The event was directly followed by the release of the Universities UK International (UUKi) and IDP Connect paper, “International Student Recruitment: Why aren’t we second? Part 2”.

This was not meant to throw a damp blanket over the celebrations but was rather a dose of reality as hangovers subsided. In truth, the reality is that the UK is probably already second, given that one of their main competitors, Australia, is on the ropes and the paper does not criticise a lack of ambition in the government’s plan to attract 600,000 international students by 2030. It is time for the sector to be more ambitious and answer the question: How and where can we be first?

Despite the challenges of this year, UK higher education has emerged from the global pandemic largely unscathed in contrast to the competition. International student numbers were challenged in 2020-21, but applications and acceptance data from UCAS is hard proof that the UK in 2021 is an attractive and welcoming destination for international students. Despite political tensions, the UK’s relationship with China seems to have weathered the storm, something which cannot be said for Australia, Canada or the United States.

The UK is the leading destination for Chinese students this year and that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. An Education International Cooperation Group survey found, for the third consecutive year, that the UK achieved favoured status – something previously held by the United States. Nearly 30% of students preferred Britain, 24.5% favoured the US and 16.5% chose Australia, with Canada 15.8% coming in fourth.

There’s further good news for the UK, with applications from India up 13% and we see a significant jump in applications from emerging markets – for example, Nigeria is up 83% and Pakistan is up 53%. When one considers deferrals from 2020-21 and record UK applications to university for this academic year, all in the garden looks rosy for UK institutions. Furthermore, when one looks at UK population data, the next nine years could see a record number of 18-year-olds looking to enter higher education.

There has, of course, been a dramatic fall of 57% in European Union enrolments in the UK following Brexit, due to the fact that EU students are now subject to international tuition fees. While reduced European numbers have hurt diversity and quality, we tend to concur with Nick Hillman at the Higher Education Policy Institute, who predicted way back in 2017 that Brexit would not be a disaster for UK universities. Hillman suggested that, in the medium to long term, UK universities are likely to benefit from increased revenue from European students paying the same international fees as their non-EU compatriots.

Universities will need as much international fee income as they can get their hands on to smooth any bumps in the road caused by the possible and, in our view likely, implementation of the proposal from the Philip Augar review of tertiary education funding that domestic tuition fees should be reduced to £7,500 (US$10,400). If this is the case, even if EU enrolment is reduced by 50%, EU students will be paying almost double the domestic tuition fees, which will compensate for the loss in numbers, if not diversity, on UK campuses.

Long-term challenges – and solutions

But the higher education sector would do well to heed the advice that first appeared in writing in John Heywood’s 1546 book on English proverbs – “make hay while the sun shines”.

By the time they get to 2030 the number of domestic 18-year-olds will begin to decline and, long before then, the Australians and New Zealanders will have fought back from their self-imposed exile. Anyone who remembers how the Aussies saw a decrease of more than 100,000 international enrolments from 2009 to 2012 won’t forget how they bounced back with an increase of 370,000 in the following seven years.

No doubt America will be back in the international game, having suffered from a declining domestic college-aged population and the hangover of the Donald Trump administration. We already see the beginnings of this. Kamala Harris’s recent trip to Southeast Asia indicates the pivotal role that the US sees ASEAN playing in future economic development and growth. One can also not bet against Canada, whose proactive education policies linked to migration will play a key role in international student mobility for the foreseeable future.

So, with resurgent international student enrolments and a runway of nine years until the boom in 18-year-old home students falls away, what should the UK be doing to establish and maintain a strategic advantage?

First, we need robust, representative, time-series data on international student outcomes. Most students will still return to their home country after study and it is a shocking indictment that the Higher Education Statistics Agency, Jisc and the Office for Students have been unwilling or unable to collect appropriate records.

Most students taking advantage of post-study work opportunities in the UK will also return home and the UUKi and IDP Connect research shows that post-study work can advantage them as they build their careers. Unfortunately, at the present time there is a total lack of insight as to how it advantages them, with no data on career outcomes and progression or the return on investment of a UK degree over an international graduate’s lifetime.

Second, the government needs to encourage and support the sector in building its soft power overseas. Global Britain should not be about a defensive island nation but about a new type of worldwide superpower that is linked with business and politics through smart graduates who recognise the quality of education they received.

Data again is the key. Government and institutions need to fully understand the strength of the UK international alumni network and utilise its links with industry to drive inward investment and international trade. The UK’s head start in transnational education offers a massive advantage if it exploits it effectively.

Thirdly, we need to throw off constraints and minimalist thinking. Make the target 750,000 international students and introduce the sound and sensible measures proposed by UUKi and IDP Connect, but also bring together establishment doyens and a new breed of innovative thinkers and actors – “a brains trust” that understands what it takes to be internationally ambitious.

Brexit was meant to be about taking back control rather than ceding ground and our universities offer the opportunity to launch global activities from a position of authority and excellence.

The late American writer and humourist Lewis Grizzard is credited with popularising the phrase: “Unless you’re the lead dog, the scenery never changes.” What the UK really needs to do is change the scenery through bold strategic action.

We should define metrics – the best graduate outcomes, the strongest transnational education, the fastest growth and others – which allow us to compare and benchmark our relative performance. But we should also strike out to be first in every market possible as well as at the top of comparable measures.

It is the first time in a decade that the UK has had this chance and the hay is there for the making.

Image by pasja1000 from Pixabay

There is more to student recruitment than edtechs offer

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece First published in University World News 04 August 2021

We probably all remember the big reveal in The Wizard of Oz (recently in the news again) when Oscar Zoroaster is revealed as a conman who had used clever props and magic tricks to maintain his place as Supreme Ruler of the Kingdom of Oz. Universities might consider this when they hear industry pundits eulogising the power of the aggregators and the Emerald City of big data. The smartest of them know that there is a place for brains, heart and courage in finding alternative solutions to meet challenging international student recruitment targets during a global pandemic.

It’s no surprise that, to date, due to lockdowns and border closures, universities have felt powerless to make an impact on international recruitment. Stuck in their back bedrooms while working from home, aggregators must have seemed like the answer to their prayers for a quick technology fix to match their new-found obsession with Zoom. This thinking was supported by the suggestion that they were low cost, simplified agent relationships and could improve student accessibility.The glamour of eye-watering valuations and bold investments by venture capital and private equity cash looking to ride the latest edtech wave seems very persuasive.

There is slick marketing, even slicker websites and the ubiquitous use of the word algorithm to confirm that artificial intelligence and machine learning can solve all problems. Anyone blinded by the hype could be easily persuaded to “follow the yellow brick road” and commit the lion’s share of next year’s recruitment budget to the Wizard.

Blinded by algorithms

But, before budgets are committed and valuable university brands handed over, it is worth taking a step back, looking behind the curtain and considering the future in a more measured way. Dorothy trusted the Wizard and did battle with a Wicked Witch on his behalf before finding he wasn’t all he appeared to be. He wasn’t evil, but it turned out that her first impressions were wrong and her true friends were really the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion.

In the case of the aggregators, those that have joined early are likely to see the best returns on their initial investment because the aggregators’ client lists remain manageable and the choices for students limited. As more universities pile in, convinced by the returns of those that have gone before them, those that have brands with limited reach or are less able to pay for placement and influence are likely to sink to the bottom. As aggregators gain clients, their revenues will grow while returns for institutions are likely to diminish over time.

Relying on an algorithm to place you in front of a student is all well and good but, just as has become accepted with Google searches, it only works out if you are on page one and preferably between one and three on the list. Showing how manipulated this can be can be seen in recent research on Studyportals where a search gave 839 courses on their ‘Our Picks’ list, with the first 10 being the University of Lincoln and the top 253 shown as ‘Featured’, indicating that they had paid to be near the top. It is debatable whether this method works in the interests of the student or the paying university.

That’s why, despite all the hype around aggregators, 46% of universities polled in a recent UK Education Advisory Service survey have not taken the plunge. They will be looking at the options and ways in which they can manage their risk while optimising any benefits that the new technology can bring. We return to Dorothy on her journey through Oz to suggest some valuable allies that might form part of a comprehensive strategy.

The Scarecrow is a model for having the brains to develop strategic thinking. Any university putting together their international recruitment strategy for next year should consider this checklist:

• Aggregators. Negotiate hard for the best deal. It is all about market share and brand for them, so they want you more than you think.
• Review direct recruitment. If you get it right, it can dramatically lower your cost of sale by building strategic relationships with international schools in target markets. Look beyond ‘Tier One’ schools which may have high numbers of expatriates who may want home fee status to ‘Tier Two’ schools to attract more international students.
• Think aggressively about meaningful engagement. Nobody needs another talk on “filling out a UCAS form” or “writing a personal statement”. Involve academic colleagues, set challenges and remember to personalise ongoing contact with schools and individual students after a first presentation.
• Get a handle on social media, networkers and influencers. Just one example is to join prospective international student groups in your target markets and search for your university name and respond to the various comments and requests for advice and guidance.
• Look to your TNE partners. They can be a route for progression, but may also add value in other ways. Examples include careers advice supporting students returning to the region or using existing employer relationships to create new revenue streams for Continuing Professional Development and-or applied research.
• Put international employability at the heart of your messaging. It is the reason students, and their parents, invest in international education. Ensure your institution has access to top graduate destinations by key international markets. Get robust, representative data to demonstrate graduate outcomes and be able to tell your ‘employability story’. Whether it’s through direct recruitment, pathways, aggregators or agents, a student’s decision will directly be influenced by their ability to get a good job and be able to progress in their career.

The Tin Man reminds us to have a heart. Do not be lured by the aggregators into abandoning pre-existing and new relationships with agents, institutions, schools and key overseas stakeholders. As the list of those on aggregator sites become longer, it is the personal touch that will end up paying dividends when it comes to recruitment.

Visiting agents’ offices, international schools and speaking to prospective students will never be a waste of time, and that personal touch is likely to be a far stronger incentive for a student to apply than their scrolling through a long list of possible study options.

Where the Lion comes in is in emphasising that universities need courage to make strategic decisions that they will stick with.

That means seeing past the possible short-term bump in recruitment that aggregators will claim and remaining focused on a game plan that both mitigates risk and builds flexible, scalable and meaningful engagement with students now and in the future. Aggregators may be a part of that strategy, but they are unlikely to be the only option or always the best solution.

Some will survive and others will fall by the wayside like the Wicked Witches of the East and the West. They will not own the student recruitment ecosystem unless universities let them.

Louise Nicol is founder of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD, and Alan Preece is an expert in global education, business transformation and operational management and runs the blogging site View from a Bridge.

Image by Please Don’t sell My Artwork AS IS from Pixabay

GOLDEN YEARS OR ASHES TO ASHES

Seeing the THE claiming that their Awards are the ‘Oscars of the education sector’ reminded me that the the first documented use of the term, by columnist Sidney Skolsky in 1934, came because he said, “The snobbery of that particular Academy Award annoyed me.” We are well into the Awards season and having already had The PIEoneer Awards with 124 Finalists across 19 categories the THE Awards may not be trying hard enough with only 123 finalists across 20 categories*. Several other organizations are getting on the Awards bandwagon, but life is short so the focus here is on the late-November THE celebration which has switched from the 5-star Grosvenor to the 4-star Hilton London Metropole.

I TURNED MYSELF TO FACE ME**

It would be fun to have Ricky Gervais turn his gimlet eye on the people at the tables and adopt his very best Golden Globes approach, “this is the last time I’m hosting these awards so I don’t care anymore. I’m joking, I never did…..Let’s go out with a bang. Let’s have a laugh at your expense, shall we?” The THE Awards are certainly the subject of a great deal of chest-beating beforehand at even being listed but maybe as Ed Sheeran’s recently commented about such nights, “The room is filled with resentment….it’s just lots of people wanting other people to fail.” Unlike the Oscars, almost all the finalists decide to put themselves forward as the most worthy so perhaps, in a spirit of post-pandemic collaboration, it would be better to have a new rule that you can only nominate another person or institution.

The THE would have been better to liken these awards to the Emmys*** where the main award winner this year was a vaguely comedic institution desperately trying to regain its place alongside the giants of the game. In a strange twist of fate, of the several nominees for the 2021 THE University of the Year, none is higher ranked in this year’s THE World Rankings than it was last year or in 2015. Success in league table rankings seems less important to the judges than the institutions themselves.

For those who are grasping for the popular culture reference, the Amazon Prime series “Ted Lasso” was a serial winner at this weekend’s Emmys****. It features a football manager who knows nothing about the game, a foul mouthed, past his prime “lord of darkness” feared by all and an owner who set out to deliberately ruin the club. These might be considered good metaphors for the worst of institutional management, the vagaries of research leadership and the government’s attitude to higher education.

I would personally welcome the Lasso, Kent and Welton Awards but if the theme has to stay with education and real people it would have been good for the THE to call them “Ronnies” after Lord Ron Dearing, whose name was attached to the THE Lifetime Achievement Award until 2018. Anyone fortunate enough to win twice could start their speech by saying something about having Two Ronnies.***** It would be a treat to see what could be made of the Awards being a load of ‘bill ‘ooks’.

Unfortunately, Lord Ron’s name disappeared from the Award in 2019 and as far as I know it wasn’t because someone had won it three times and been allowed to keep it as per Brazil and the Jules Rimet Trophy******. Perhaps his seminal report of 1997 was no longer seen as quite modern enough but 2019 was also the year private equity group Inflexion Pvt. Equity Partners LLP acquired the THE. I don’t see much chance of the Sir Philip Augar Awards any time soon but with Gavin Williamson being touted for a knighthood anything must be possible.

THE STREAM OF WARM IMPERMANENCE

The loss of the Dearing Award is one sign that the THE Awards might be a mirror for the changing face of UK higher education. For example, 2019 should probably be known as the Year of the Technocrats (or Revenge of the Registry) with a whole new slew of awards for Excellence in Registry Services, Outstanding Estates Strategy, Outstanding Financial Performance, Outstanding Library Team, Outstanding Strategic Planning Team and Outstanding Marketing/Communications Team.

Registry, Financial Performance and Strategic Planning were dropped the following year but perhaps they were just too busy to buy enough tables at the dinner or already got their invitations from anxious to please private sector providers. 2019 was also the year of 23 Award categories which was up from the 18 in 2011. Inflation of 28% in categories but at least another five tables of ten to be sold to “nominated” universities considering attending the glittering occasion.

Outstanding Support for Early Career Researchers was lost in 2015 which seems a shame because they seem to get a pretty raw deal and their seniors don’t feel recognized for the mentoring they do. The Outstanding Research Supervisor of the Year was the successor category from 2016 but it doesn’t seem to capture the notion that the whole institution should be involved in this fundamental aspect of university business.

Colleagues who know about these things will also be nodding wisely at the fact that there is no place specifically for Careers Advice and Guidance Departments in the Awards. It’s a neglected backwater for most universities and Tribal research suggests institutions spend ten times as much on international recruitment as helping students get job. So the Awards recognize where the main non-academic funding goes which is big shiny new buildings (Estates), slick, shiny new enrollment campaigns (MarComms) and the very expensive headache that is an academic library.

Sponsors, as you would expect, also tend to put their money where the best return might be. It is surely no coincidence that Outstanding Contribution to the Local Community has had only one year sponsored out of the last ten whereas the NCEE seems to own the Outstanding Entrepreneurial University category. Elsevier seems to have switched horses having backed the Art, Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of the Year 2017 and 2018 but plumping for the STEM equivalent since 2019.

There is something depressingly obvious about the categories and the impression they give of a sector stuck in a time warp. The Widening Participation or Outreach Initiative of the Year has not been won by a Russell Group university since Sheffield in 2014 and the Outstanding Contribution to the Local Community category this year can only claim a partial nominee in the University of Nottingham’s partnership with Nottingham Trent. The Group talks a lot about its intentions and efforts that it seems surprising that members are not quite breaking through.

The Outstanding Contribution to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Award was launched last year with six nominees coming from universities ranked below 42^nd in the UK by the THE’s own world rankings. It’s good to see St Andrews flying the flag for the both the Russell Group and globally ranked UK top ten institutions this year but it’s another area where the “best universities” don’t seem to be establishing their credentials.

HOW THE OTHERS MUST SEE THE FAKER

Like the THE’s Impact ratings, the Awards ceremony tends to reward institutions and people who take time to promote themselves and who may see it as the key to obtaining more resources or students. Some entrants may also see them as a gateway to a new job, a new honour or a way of cementing a reputation as a guru of the sector. The ceremonies themselves make money, big service providers can entertain their prospective and current clients, and the event manager sucks the goodwill into its bank of favours for future profitable enterprises.

Nothing wrong with any of that in a commercial sense and many industries do it. But if higher education wants to stop being considered the same as accounting, retailing and restaurants it may want to consider how it responds to the lure of a commercial company offering small baubles of fame. There’s plenty of scope for Universities UK or another industry-led body to run a sector wide Awards ceremony and I suspect that the THE would find it difficult not to become a sponsor and report on the winners. Just a thought.

Notes

* Apologies if there is any miscount here but like Ricky Gervais – I really don’t care😊 The THE says “seventy-eight institutions and teams” but I think it’s nice to count the individual finalists as well.

**Sharp eyed readers of a certain generation and sensibility will have recognized the sub-titles as lines from David Bowie’s wonderful song Changes which features on Hunky Dory – one of the few flawless albums. The title is of course two Bowie song titles.

*** The Emmys are awarded by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The name Emmy derives from Immy, a nickname for image orthicon, a camera tube used in television. More interestingly the acronym of the awarding organization’s name is SATAN backward.

**** I recognize that The Crown is considered the winner of the main awards but a series about palace intrigue, privilege, insensitivity to public opinion and personal spite feels too close to the mark for comfort. The fabrication of history and sensationalising of complex issues involving real people also does not recommend it to me.

***** For readers outside the UK “The Two Ronnies was a comedy sketch show featuring Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker that ran in the UK from 1971 to 1987. One of the most beloved sketches (and the link here) featured a hardware store where a customer sought items and was misunderstood by the shop owner.

****** The Jules Rimet Trophy was the original prize for winning the FIFA World Cup. Originally called “Victory”, but generally known simply as the World Cup or Coupe du Monde, it was renamed in 1946 to honour the FIFA President Jules Rimet. Famously, the trophy was stolen during the World Cup in the UK in 1966 but was found seven days later by a black and white mongrel dog named Pickles. The Brazilian team won the tournament for the third time in 1970, allowing them to keep the real trophy in perpetuity, as had been stipulated by Jules Rimet in 1930. The trophy was stolen in 1983 and never recovered.

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

RANK HYPOCRISY

Shock and horror as the THE World Top Ten Universities 2022 are revealed as….exactly the same ten names as 2021. A small shuffle of the deck saw Stanford drop from second to fourth but The Stanford Daily seemed more concerned with the question Who Is Elizabeth Holmes, The Stanford Dropout Now on Trial? As someone probably once said – if you’re truly world class you don’t say it and you certainly don’t need the THE to tell you.

LinkedIn was full of university marketing chiefs and even some academics, who should probably know better, trumpeting their performance. Newcastle University’s marketers expressed pride that it had moved into the top 150 but it had simply returned to 146^th – exactly the position it occupied in the 2011-12 rankings. There were plenty of other institutions with short term memories talking without any regard for whether their ranking meant real, sustainable or even meaningful progress.

It’s a merry go round that was called out recently by Vincenzo Raimo who noted that universities tend to celebrate advances but complain about the distortion and negative impact of the rankings. When leading academics do call into questions the methodology, as David Price, UCL’s Vice Provost of Research did recently, they get snide responses from the promoter in chief. Perhaps the THE is becoming The Borg and thinks that “resistance is futile”.

What the THE has certainly seen is that university compliance and hypocrisy has enabled them to exploit the “trusted rankings” as a platform for THE Student. To the mix they add a spiel about “hand-picked partners” who will help student “make the right choices”. A cynic might suggest that the many privately financed partners on the list are much more likely to ensure a result which is in their own interests.

But It May Be Worse Than That

It would seem harmless to simply accept that the World Rankings have become a university version of the Sunday Times Rich List where envious glances are occasionally followed by spectacular falls from grace. Maybe The Stanford Daily is offering a metaphor by focusing on a cautionary tale of hubris and deceit just as these rankings were published. But the THE doesn’t appear to be in any doubt about the game it is playing.

They say that “even if you do not meet the inclusion criteria, you will be entitled to a university profile on our website that will increase your visibility to our audience of academics, prospective students and their parents.” It is a university version from the “Toxic Sludge is Good for You” playbook which Publisher’s Weekly called “a cautionary reminder that much of the consumer and political world is created by for-hire mouthpieces in expensive neckties.”. Even the most limited institution, regardless of reputation or quality, can benefit from reflected glory as part of this commercial enterprise.

The THE sells the benefits of the rankings very hard and articulates them as global exposure with tens of millions of page views, data trusted by governments and universities, and a vital resource for students when they are making decisions about where to study. The point about ‘trusted by governments’ is a big part of the sales patter including a recent Tweet which highlighted the EU Commission’s, Gerard de Graaf saying, “We know that rankings do more to direct universities’ attention, policy makers’ attention, students’ attention than any other policy tool… “.

Surprising then that in 2014, the very same year of de Graaf’s comments, the European Commission gave €2m funding to establish U-Multirank explicitly, “to avoid simplistic league tables which can result in misleading comparisons between institutions of very different types”. Dr. Simon Marginson, Professor of International Higher Education, UCL Institute of Education, University College, London called U-Multirank, “a vital corrective to the “football” league mentality that has crept into higher education…”. The point is that the EU did not see ‘rankings’ as the answer to anyone’s problems or need for better quality information.

Gaming The System

The tweet also claims that de Graaf “urged@timeshighered to develop rankings on impact” which they framed around the UN’s SDGs and first published in 2019. To be included in the overall ranking an institution has to self-select and submit data on SDG 17 and at least three other SDGs of its choice. It’s difficult to see, however, that an institution can’t selectively manage its performance in three SDGs and SDG 17 while being a mediocre or even poor actor in the other thirteen.

The University of Manchester’s top spot in the 2021 Impact Rankings suggests how partial this process can be and why students looking for insights might do well to look elsewhere. An alternative might be the People and Planet UK-based student network that has been running an environmental and ethical performance league tables since 2007. The organisation also does useful things like training and mentoring young people, campaigning and challenging vested interests locally and internationally.

Its 2019 League Table gave the University of Manchester a low-ranking in the Upper Second-Class Honours bracket and 59^th in the UK. To be totally fair it also notes that the University has fully completed a commitment to divest from all fossil fuels. It is arguable that the THE rankings give too much opportunity for institutions to game the system and, as a Professor of History in a 5* department once said to me, “we are all here because we are good at passing tests”.

If the principle is that the THE Impact Rankings are a “vital resource” for students wanting to make a choice they might do well to consider giving a broader context. Students travel internationally to share in a cultural experience and could easily find that selecting a university based on the Impact rankings leads them to places where the off-campus setting is a little less in tune with their sensibilities. It’s not necessarily that the universities aren’t trying hard but there are very real limits to their power.

The country with the largest representation in the Impact rankings is Russia with 75 institutions which seems counter-intuitive given that the country is only 46 of 165 in the UN’s own SDG rankings. In early 2020 Transparency International ranked the country 137^th out of 180 in its Corruption Perceptions Index at a point when the Russian Academy of Sciences was reported as finding “widespread plagiarism in Russian academic journals, with more than 850 articles rescinded from 263 journals after an initial review.” More concerning is the repression, sexual harassment and intimidation of students and faculty outlined by the Russian student magazine DOXA.

At 27 in the Impact rankings is Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University in Saudi Arabia – a country down at 98 in the UN rankings. The university scores well on SDG 10 for reducing inequalities at a point when the UN does not appear to have information available to give the country a score. Meanwhile Finland, which is top of the UN league table, doesn’t have a university ranked until the 201-300 bracket by the THE.

When Gaming Becomes Cheating

League table manipulation is a theme that Malcolm Gladwell picked up in his Revisionist History podcast series. Calling the U.S. News & World Report college rankings an “abomination” might sound harsh but his analysis points to the way the rankings can distort perceptions of higher education. The edition on Project Dillard focuses on the specifics of how a historically black university in New Orleans is disadvantaged “even though, on a number of very objective measures, it does an outstanding job of educating the students who go there.”

His argument is that, fundamentally, the league table gives no encouragement for small and rich colleges to use their advantaged position to serve larger numbers of students. The corollary is that Dillard University could leap sixty places up the US News rankings by cutting 75% of its students. All of this is before the various scandals of colleges manipulating data to improve their place in the US News rankings.

In this vein the THE Impact rankings have a corrections page where any errors in data collection and changes to rank as a result are listed. The notable thing about this is that every case where incorrect or incomplete data was submitted the university’s ranking has either not changed or they have gone up the table. It’s a relatively small sample but one might imagine that institutions are keen to, legitimately, correct the data when they feel they have done poorly but less likely to review data when rankings have gone well.

Earlier this year a report by the Center for Studies in Higher Education produced an analysis suggesting the QS World Rankings had a conflict of interest due to its consulting business. QS responded that the consulting contract with the university stipulated that there was no link to rankings and that they had policies to ensure staff were “free from personal or commercial bias”. Readers will make up their own minds but as league tables become increasingly commercially exploited the risks becomes greater.

If Resistance Is Futile…Consider Changing the Rules

Nobody should kid themself that league tables have not had a material impact on decision making within universities. Hours, days and weeks of planning and strategy have been exhausted on understanding the levers that can be pulled to move institutions up various rankings and this effort would not be made unless it fed into actions. The available tools are relatively blunt but increasing the number of ‘good degrees’ always looked manipulable and it is arguable that the 90% growth in first class degrees awarded in the UK between 2010/11 and 2018/19 is one visible sign of that pressure.

But Forbes tells us some interesting things about “no win scenarios and ethical leadership” and draws on Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru scenario as its exemplar. Famously, Captain James T. Kirk overcame the no-win training scenario by reprogramming the simulation and has led a fierce debate over whether he cheated or was simply creative. Author Janet D. Stemwedel cuts through this by suggesting “it’s important to be able to deal with trying to live up to our ethical obligations while knowing full well that circumstances and our own limitation cannot guarantee we’ll succeed.”

University league tables won’t go away and universities may feel obliged to play the game because of the political, social and recruitment leverage they might offer. However, academics do not have to join in by offering their opinions about other universities and institutions do not need to manipulate their decision making with one eye on the league table impact. There could also be more concerted pushback against the dumbing down that emphasizes overall rankings and oases of excellence in a sea of mediocrity or even corruption. If the aim is to help students faced with the biggest decision of their lives it’s worth the effort.

Notes

The complexity of league table methodology is the stuff of legend but it does not really aid understanding. The commentary on the THE approach to the overall SDG table reflects my understanding of the paragraph – A university’s final score in the overall table is calculated by combining its score in SDG 17 with its top three scores out of the remaining 16 SDGs. SDG 17 accounts for 22 per cent of the overall score, while the other SDGs each carry a weight of 26 per cent. This means that different universities are scored based on a different set of SDGs, depending on their focus.

As always I am happy to review authoritative comment which may aid understanding and will reflect this in an update if necessary.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay