How Badly Do India’s Universities Need To Chase World Rankings?

Prof. Pushkar of BITS Pilani discusses whether India’s higher education sector should focus on chasing world university rankings.

With the government now making it mandatory for all universities and colleges to secure NAAC accreditation, there has been a surge in the numbers of colleges and universities applying for accreditation. It is quite possible that once most higher education institutions are accredited, the numbers of average and below-average institutions will look worse than they do today.

Despite everything that is wrong with India’s higher education, there is no reason for panic about the absence of its universities in the top 100 or 200. Higher education experts agree that the world rankings of universities are limited in terms of what they measure. Chasing world rankings may do little to improve the overall quality of higher education in the country. However, there are visible signs that Indian officials are getting desperate to place one or more Indian institutions in the top 100 institutions worldwide.

How much should India worry about world rankings?

Indian policy makers should not pay too much attention to world rankings; instead, they should focus on building world-class universities, or even world-class departments.

There are several good reasons why aiming lower should be a preferred strategy.

Building world-class universities takes time and requires a mix of a variety of ingredients, including resources, autonomy, leadership and good governance, well-qualified faculty, vision and planning, ability to attract competitive students, luck and persistence. Of these, the quality of faculty is considered crucial. Building world-ranked universities, on the other hand, involves the possession of something more – the ability to compete effectively for the most well-qualified faculty at the international level.

India’s policy makers would be well-advised to focus on building world-class universities rather than seek to place one or more of its universities in the top 100 because the country’s higher education system is not designed to hire the best faculty from around the world. In an increasingly globalized higher education environment, capable faculty move across borders relatively easily. India’s universities produce too few quality PhDs and face stiff competition for West-trained PhDs from not only Western universities but increasingly also from Asian and Middle Eastern universities, which are far more agile (read ‘less bureaucratic’) and resource-rich (read ‘able to offer higher salaries’) than Indian universities. It is only a very small number of Indians who pursue their PhDs abroad in science, engineering, and health choose to return home.

Indeed, even the best Indian institutions continue to face shortages of qualified faculty because of poor supply of qualified faculty, information gaps, “reserved” faculty positions for lower castes (most of which remain unoccupied), the reluctance or even opposition of existing faculty to hire candidates better qualified than they are and the reluctance of many younger PhDs to take up jobs in locations far away from the largest and more livable cities.

Those involved in the making of India’s higher education policies, whether bureaucrats, politicians or university administrators, need to understand that such disadvantages represent an enormous obstacle in placing an Indian institution in the top 100. The advantage with seeking a more modest goal of building world-class universities is that it is quite conceivable that over time and with a bit of luck, these universities could become world-ranked universities.

Chasing world rankings the wrong way

The talk and more talk of the absence of Indian universities among the world’s best is creating an unnecessary rush to place at least one institution in the top 100. To be fair, India is not unique in this respect. There seems to be a race among many Asian countries to place more of their universities among the top 100 or 200 in the world.

In mid-January 2014, Indian officials announced that the 16 currently-existing IITs would pool their resources to try and secure a higher position in world university rankings. At this stage, it is not clear whether the government will go ahead with this plan; some sources report that it is an option under consideration.

However, according to reports, the expectation is that the “IIT Collective” (if we can call it that) will break into the top 10.

This is a bad plan that should be immediately abandoned. As Phil Baty, Editor of Times Higher Education Rankings noted (personal communication), the exercise seems to be simply about “presenting the data differently” and an attempt to “game the rankings system.” Even if the IIT Collective was to climb up the charts, India’s existing challenges and problems in the higher education sector would still remain unresolved.

The plan represents the mistaken belief that size and numbers can compensate for quality. For example, among the key indicators considered by world ranking organizations are research output and citations. The advantage of forming an IIT Collective is that it would increase the total research output and citations which may be useful with some ranking organizations. However, larger numbers will certainly not help with THE rankings which scale for size.

According to a 2009 study, each IIT faculty member averages one research paper a year while her colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) does six.

The IIT Collective, therefore, may not climb up the charts in the THE rankings; indeed, it may even slide down if, for example, the average publication per faculty member for the IIT Collective is lower than that of IIT-Delhi or Kharagpur.

The setting up of an IIT Collective will also mean that better-performing IITs such as those at Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Mumbai will lose their distinctive identities as well as an opportunity to count as world-ranked institutions on their own. With 16 IITs out of the picture, India will have fewer high-quality institutions that could be placed in world-rankings.

Finally, as Phil Baty pointed out, THE “may not even be able to accept a group submission from IITs anyway, unless the IITs go through the disruption of legally forming a single entity.”

India’s universities need to aim lower and be counted as world-class institutions before they seek world rankings. Aiming high without proper tools is a bad idea. If it is world rankings that policy makers are chasing, a better option would be to identify say 10-20 higher education institutions and support them in every way possible. In this regard, the so-called “innovation universities” initiative looks quite promising.

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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: St. Simon/Flickr/CC.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

Pushkar is a faculty member at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani-Goa.

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