The Easiest Way to Boost Rankings: Kill the Humanities?

An interesting OECD look at college and university rankings around the world:

Exhortations to become world class have tucked universities into a Procrustean bed of indicators. Presidents anxiously cut back programmes, reorient their university’s mission, swell application numbers to tighten student selectivity, and seek mergers with higher-ranking institutions–conversely, those higher up jealously guard their hard-won reputations and shy away from collaborating with anyone but their peers. Deep excisions may be made into the social sciences and humanities to leave more room for the natural sciences and research. Speaking at the biennial conference of the OECD’s Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) in September, Ellen Hazelkorn of the Dublin Institute of Technology, cited a respondent to an international survey which said that “the easiest way to boost rankings is to kill the Humanities”. Clearly not a realistic proposition, though another survey told her that “reputation, unfortunately, is always based on research, and research attracts the best talent”.

But rankings are not going to go away. After all, they can provoke useful questions, such as “why exactly are we not in the top group?”, or indeed, “how can we maintain this lead?”. Governments and universities will still use them, as fierce competition between universities induces copycat behaviour unless policy encourages diversity. Whether they serve as an accurate guide to higher education is therefore strictly academic.

Contribution of Higher Education Institutions to Regional Development

This report is from the OECD Directorate for Education and based on research conducted from 2004–2007. A follow-up/continuation study from 2008–2010 is currently underway:

Universitites and other higher education institutions (HEIs) make a significant contribution to regional economic, social and cultural development. In a globalised economy this role is growing in importance. IMHE, in collaboration with the OECD Territorial Development and Public Governance Directoriate, has conducted a comparative review of how these issues are addressed in OECD countries, with the objective of reinforcing the partnerships between institutions and regions.

From one of the linked reports, a "policy brief":

The contribution of HEIs to developing their home regions has not previously been a major concern for public policy or the HEIs themselves. But this is changing with the expansion of higher education, particularly in the non-university sector, which in some cases has aimed to addresws regional disparities. Another crucial factor is a poilicy switch in most OECD counties towards indigenous development in regions emphasizing skills, entrepreneurialism and innovation.

Tertiary Education for the Knowledge Society

In today’s knowledge-driven global economy, countries need to build on tertiary education to generate innovation, sustain competitiveness and boost economic growth. A new OECD report, Tertiary Education for the Knowledge Society, offers policy recommendations to help meet these goals:

Among its recommendations:
Goals – Ensure that tertiary education contributes to economic and social objectives: foster links to employers, communities and labour markets; promote effective university-industry links for research and innovation.
Governance – Devise sound instruments to steer tertiary education: improve the capacity of ministries to develop policy and evaluate performance; establish and maintain a balance between institutional autonomy and public accountability.
Funding – Develop a funding strategy to optimise the contribution of tertiary education to society and the economy: cost-sharing between students and government; a comprehensive student support system; subsidies related to the benefits tertiary programmes bring to society.
Quality Assurance – Emphasise quality and relevance: improve quality assurance frameworks; develop a strong quality culture; focus more on student outcomes.
Equity – Give greater prominence to equity in national tertiary education policy: systematically monitor equity issues; devote significant resources to address inequities.
Internationalisation – Position national systems in the international arena: develop a strategy and framework for internationalisation; encourage institutions to be more proactive internationally.

A Worldwide Test for Higher Education?

Doug Lederman writes, in Inside Higher Ed, about a quiet move to explore implementing a worldwide student learning outcomes assessment for higher education. Not everyone is happy with the idea; the comments section is quite lively.

[T]he Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has convened a small group of testing experts and higher education policy makers who have met quietly in recent months to discuss the possibility of creating a common international system to measure the learning outcomes of individual colleges and university systems, along the lines of the well-regarded test that OECD countries now administer to 15-year-olds, the Program for International Student Assessment.

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[SCUPer] Trudy W. Banta, a professor of higher education and senior adviser to the chancellor for academic planning and evaluation at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, said she believed that it would be extremely difficult to design one measure that could apply “across the many cultures, languages, institutions” that are part of the OECD universe. Beyond those practical concerns, though, Banta, who has written in Inside Higher Ed and other publications about the limitations of standardized measures of learning, expressed a more philosophical concern. “I’m afraid that everybody is looking for a silver bullet, a magic potion, that will tell them about quality” in higher education. “The latest tool in that arsenal is a standardized test,” which inevitably results, she said, in oversimplified measurements of institutions’, or in this case potentially countries’, success or failure.