As China measures university success, Australia has done well

The University of Sydney’s Salvatore Babones.

Melbourne and Sydney are up, Queensland is flat, and Adelaide is out. No, that’s not the latest coronavirus report. It’s the 2020 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), published Saturday by China’s ShanghaiRanking Consultancy.

And it’s a ray of winter sunshine for Australia’s beleaguered Group of Eight (Go8) research universities.

Australia now has seven universities in the global Top 100, up from two when the rankings were first published in 2003. A decade ago, only three Australian universities hit the Top 100: the ANU, Sydney, and Melbourne. They’ve since been joined by Monash, Queensland, UNSW, and the University of Western Australia.

That makes Australia third in the world in Top 100 universities, trailing only the United States (with 41) and the United Kingdom (with 8). China is nipping at Australia’s heels with 6 universities in the global Top 100 and another seven waiting in the wings, currently in the 101-150 band. Australia’s closest near-miss is Adelaide, ranked 151-200. (Positions below the Top 100 are given only given in broad ranges.)

It’s no surprise that Chinese universities are charging up the ARWU rankings. They are, after all, China’s rankings. At the turn of the millennium, the Chinese government set its elite ‘C9’ universities the goal of breaking into the world’s Top 100. The only problem was that there was no official list to break into. So China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University, ranked number 63 in the world this year, too it upon itself to set up the ARWU.

Now published by a commercial spin-off, the ARWU gives universities credit for winning Nobel prizes (as long as they’re not in literature or peace), for Fields Medals in mathematics, for publications in the prestigious scientific journals Science and Nature, for publications in the sciences and social sciences more broadly, and for employing ‘highly cited researchers’ (HCRs), a group of 6216 top scientists identified by the data consultancy Clarivate Analytics.

What’s left out of the ARWU is as telling as what goes in. There is no credit for teaching, for the arts and humanities, or for book publications. After all, the ARWU wasn’t set up to reflect a liberal, Western vision of the university as a community of scholars. It was set up by China to measure performance on China’s priorities.

The ARWU may not care about us, but Australia’s Go8 universities care deeply about the ARWU. Most feature the ARWU (among other rankings) in their annual reports. The two exceptions are telling: Adelaide is not in the global Top 100, while the ANU has seen a long-term decline in its ARWU performance. Between 2003 and 2017, the ANU fell from 49th to 97th place, almost dropping out of the Top 100 altogether before rising 28 places in 2018. The saviour was a sudden jump in its number of HCRs.

It was also HCRs who drove Melbourne up the rankings, from 92nd place in 2003 to 35th this year. In fact, Australia’s total share of the world’s HCRs has increased from 1.7 per cent to 4.4 per cent since 2004. How have Australian universities managed to accumulate such a large proportion of the world’s HCRs, while all the time complaining about inadequate government support for research? In two words: Chinese students.

The University of Melbourne, which has gone whole hog on Chinese students, has been able to buy its way up the rankings. The ANU, which had been slightly more circumspect, fell behind — until it too joined the scramble for Chinese students in 2016. Adelaide and Western Australia, geographically disadvantaged in the competition for Chinese student dollars, have struggled to keep up.

Depending on your point of view, the Go8’s rankings success can be a good news story (the Go8 has poured Chinese student money into hiring star academics who have delivered the goods) or a distressing picture of a dysfunctional university system (eager to succeed on China’s terms, the Go8 abandoned its core mission of educating Australian students in order to pursue ARWU rankings). Take your pick. Either way, our universities look more and more like China’s every year.

The coronavirus-induced exodus of Chinese students virtually assures that the Go8 will soon start a painful climb down from its decade at the top of the charts. Was it all worth it? For Go8 vice chancellors whose bonuses were linked to rankings success, the answer is obvious. For the rest of us, it may all turn out to have been an exercise in futility. It’s nice to have been on top of the world, if only for a while. It would be nicer if the cliff we’re about to fall off didn’t look so steep or so high.

Salvatore Babones is an associate professor at the University of Sydney.