On “Arbitrariness” of World University Rankings

• In Event: Travelling Knowledge (I): Concepts, Practices and Institutions

Abstract

An article that appeared in a Japanese financial newspaper IN 2015 might shock a lot of people working in Japanese HEIs. It reported that Japanese government was introducing numerical targets to measure the results of its Fifth Science and Technology Basic Plan, which will form the core of its science and technology policies for the coming five years, and that one of the targets to be adopted will be the global rankings of Japanese universities.
The first time global university rankings were adopted as a quantitative target for public policy was in the Japan Revitalization Strategy published in 2013. This strategy included as one of its targets to have “at least 10 [Japanese universities] among the top 100 in the global ranking of universities.”

Actually, however, there can be seen arbitrariness in all the processes to produce world university rankings. For examples, there could be seen big leaps of Turkish universities in THE’s World University Rankings in 2014, and its cause is easily attributed to just two of Higgs boson papers published in 2012. Therefore, ranking agencies had to “improve” their methodologies the next year.

From this episode, it is evident that the global rankings of universities, which are subject to big shifts based on the thinking of the ranking agencies, are not something to fret over, nor are they appropriate for adoption as numerical targets. Still many universities cannot neglect such rankings and are struggling to get better scores in such rankings. I will analyze these situations.

Author

• Masashi Shirabe, Tokyo Institute of Technology