National university ranking in need of improvements

Around the world there is growing engagement with international university rankings, from students, parents, academics and institutional planners. It is unsurprising that India, which fares relatively poorly in the internationally recognised rankings, should be jumping on this bandwagon.

India has undertaken its own voluntary domestic institutional ranking scheme, differentiated according to university and college segments, reflecting their different imprimatur and operational autonomy.

The Indian domestic rankings effort could be viewed as an important stepping stone to a better performance on the international scale.

The Indian ranking scheme focuses on five core elements with accompanying marks, weightings and benchmarks: teaching, learning and resources; researcher productivity, impact and intellectual property; graduate outcomes; outreach and inclusivity; and perceptions (surveys).

In many ways, the domestic Indian ranking has much to commend it. On the positive side, it attempts to bring objective data, performance measurement and monitoring into an education system that is generally regarded as being opaque.

Arguably, this process of 'performance discovery' will lead to enhanced and visible gains in effectiveness and efficiency as well as transparency. It aligns in some ways with the established international rankings. For example, it also ranks research impact as does the Times Higher Education, or THE, ranking but with a focus on patents, whereas THE ranks research income.

Indian priorities and values

The ranking system, however, rightly also reflects the particular features of the Indian scene and thus extends beyond what is offered by the international rankings, which are very much driven by developed country priorities and values.

Attention is paid to access to education for disadvantaged sections of the Indian community and quality of facilities, which has been much criticised as falling well short of international standards.

According to the All India Survey on Higher Education, the Gross Enrolment Ratio – which measures the percentage of those in the 18-23 age group who are enrolled in education – shows 22.7% of females are enrolled in higher education, compared to 24.5% of men.

The differences are starker when considering disadvantaged groups – 18.5% for Scheduled Castes and 13.3% for Scheduled Tribes. The labour force participation of females is similarly weak at 24% of the total labour force, according to the World Bank.

In our view the established international rankings could do well also to factor in some of these variables since inequality is also a growing concern in the developed world.

Improvements?

However, there are certainly opportunities to improve the Indian rankings. Many of these would represent 'stretch goals'.

First, opportunities have been missed to look even more seriously at quality indicators. As just one example, the research metrics concentrate on volume of outputs and citations rather than on publications in highly cited, leading edge journals.

We also note, as Erich Dietrich and Rahul Choudaha have done in a recent University World News article, that the ranking system might simply cater to a handful of institutions rather than bringing forth major reforms, greater quality, accountability and transparency across the entire sector.

Second, there is no explicit consideration of employability of graduates. Indian institutions lack the ability to produce graduates with skills that are required by industry. Put simply, many institutions are not producing work-ready graduates.

Third, a small window of opportunity or at least a crack of light might have been capitalised on if the rankings were to seriously address the extent and cost of bureaucratic hurdles in the sector through, for example, performance benchmarks on reducing red tape. However, we do recognise that this is an endemic sector-wide problem rather than an institution-specific one?

Fourth, with knowledge and research now transcending national and institutional boundaries, to capitalise on complementary capabilities, share costs and diffuse risks, an opportunity has been lost in not having research collaboration, both international and domestic, as a feature of the Indian rankings.

Fifth, while the emphasis on the disadvantaged is laudable, would it not be better to have broader metrics around community engagement (recognising the difficulties of identifying and measuring such things)? After all, the Narendra Modi government in its 200 days progress report called for “Connecting Higher Education to Villages” which is about leveraging the capabilities in the higher education system to address the critical challenges faced by villages.

Another missed opportunity is the inclusion of the student to faculty ratio as a proxy for the quality of education. It could have provided an alternative perspective from an emerging global player, rather than embracing a highly questionable metric in terms of meaning and usefulness.

International students in India

Finally, given growing student mobility around the world, affording even greater priority to international students in India could be warranted to further strengthen the global flow of ideas and development of dense alumni networks. According to the latest Global Innovation Rankings, India is ranked 112th out of 141 countries on inward international student mobility.

However, we recognise that explicitly including this in rankings is a stretch since capacity constraints and absence of support services for students, including international students, is a pressing challenge.

In short, while the newly established ranking has a number of important features, certain inclusions may make the rankings more valuable and produce significant enhancements in the performance of Indian higher education.

Further, a critical challenge for Indian higher education authorities will be to harness rankings for the betterment of the entire sector, including appropriate monitoring and evaluation capabilities, both in institutions and at the government level. Finally, our suggestions may also provide food for thought for the already established mainstream rankings schema.

Anand Kulkarni is senior manager, planning and research, and Angel Calderon is principal advisor, planning and research, at RMIT University, Australia. Kulkarni has a book coming out in 2017 titled India and the Knowledge Economy: Progress and perils. Calderon is working on an edited volume about higher education towards 2040.