University rankings groups are powerful and call the shots

University rankings are immensely influential in determining where international students choose to study.

James Carville, the very colourful political tactician to former US president Bill Clinton, once said he’d changed his mind about who he’d like to come back as if reincarnation was an option.

“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody,” Carville famously said.

If a university vice-chancellor had to make the same choice, especially one waxing rich on international students, I have little doubt as to who they would choose to be – a university rankings group.

The rankers, particularly the big three – QS, Times Higher Education and the Academic Ranking of World Universities – call the shots. Their listings are immensely influential in determining where international students choose to study, particularly in the lucrative Chinese market.

Rankings are especially important for universities in a country like Australia, which is not a first choice destination. Students’ top preferences are likely to be the US or the UK, unless they can be persuaded to do Down Under by our universities’ improving rankings.

That’s why Australian universities which are serious about tapping international students have specialists whose job it is to analyse rankings and strategise how their university can rise.

So what a gift it was two weeks ago when, instead of universities having to go to the QS rankings, the QS rankings came to them. A major change in methodology led to most Australian universities rising, some dramatically so, and three universities – Melbourne, Sydney and UNSW – vaulting into the world’s top 20.

Interestingly, here is where QS and universities need to tread carefully. QS has another relationship with most Australian universities. It helps them recruit international students, finding potential students leads and working to turn them into enrolments.

Is there a conflict of interest here? QS says no. Decisions about rankings are made independently of commercial considerations, says QS vice-president (institutional performance) Ben Sowter.

A key reason behind Australian universities’ rise in the QS rankings was the QS decision to reduce the weighting on faculty to student ratio from 20 per cent to 10 per cent. (Faculty is the US term for an academic member of staff.) This measure (intended as a proxy for quality of teaching) is one in which Australian universities perform badly because of their large class sizes.

Ironically, it’s the reduced weighting on a poor outcome which was a major factor in Australian universities’ ranking boost. But Korean universities, which do very well on this metric, slid down the rankings when the weighting was halved. They are ropeable. A 52 strong group of Korean universities are threatening to boycott the QS rankings.

Sowter defends the reduced weight given to the faculty to student ratio. “We were under no illusions … that faculty-student ratio is an effective measure of teaching quality,” he says.

Furthermore, he says the high 20 per cent weighting on faculty to student ratio was often cited to QS as being a concern by those it consulted with about the rankings methodology.

Why do rankings have such power over Australian universities? The obvious reason is their high dependence on international student fee revenue.

What use, really, are the rankings to students? Some. There is cachet in holding a degree from a “highly ranked” university and some jobs in China demand a postgraduate degree from a top 200 university.

Can the position of a single number on a list tell potential students all they need to know about their intended education institution? Of course not.

But rankings continue to have an immense hold over universities because of the international student revenue model.

Vice-chancellors must to bow and scrape to them and the belief that they hold uniquely valuable information must be subscribed to. As long as universities sign onto this my decision’s easy. Bring me back as a university ranker.