Global rankings as âsoft powerâ
Global rankings are the inevitable product of an internationalised higher education market and world economy. Since 2003, they have become a phenomenon in every world region, and in almost every country. In different and varying ways, national governments and higher education institutions (HEIs) have embraced the tenets of rankings whilst adopting contradictory positions â publicly denouncing or distancing themselves from rankings while privately developing policies and practices that can positively affect their position in the rankings. This is because, regardless of our views about their merits or otherwise, rankings matter. They have acquired legitimacy because their methodology appears statistically rigorous, and they appear to be the only way to compare performance and quality internationally. And, because higher education is considered the engine of the knowledge-economy, the quality and status of higher education and university-based research has become an essential and vital indicator of competitiveness.
Like financial rating agencies, rankings have successfully linked the talent-catching and knowledge-producing capability of HEIs with the capacity of the âcompetitive stateâ (Cerny 2000) to participate in world science and the global economy. In doing so, rankings send out strong signals not just to students and their parents, or stakeholders of all hues, but critically to mobile capital and talent. With the onslaught of global rankings, the higher education world became immediately and visibly more competitive and multi-polar as the publicity surrounding their multi-annual appearance powerfully attests. The response of policy onlookers was an immediate intake of breath as this new dawn appeared. While rankings may have started life as a tool to inform student choice and underpin public accountability, today, they say much more about geopolitical matters.
The history of rankings goes back to the early years of the last century, with each of its four phases reflecting social and political characteristics of their time (see Chapter 2). Cattellâs American Men of Science (1910), the first of several such publications by him and others, looked at the educational origins of eminent men in excellent universities, before moving on to consider broader questions of institutional excellence. A historical turning point came during the 1950s when reputation factors replaced those focused on âacademic originsâ. The arrival of the more commercially driven US News and World Report in the mid-1980s reflected growing massification and student mobility in the United States and what Karabel (2005, 514) refers to as the ideological and public âshift in the Zeitgeist towards the glorification of marketsâ. The origin and rise of global rankings coincided with the intensification of globalisation and global competition, and the strengthening of an internationalised academic and professional labour market as precondition of a global knowledge-economy. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) originated in 2003 from the desire to provide a benchmarking tool to underpin the Chinese governmentâs political and economic strategy. By being established in this way, ARWU consummated soft powerâs geopolitical efficacy from the outset. It was followed swiftly by the Spanish-based Webometrics (2004) and the UK-based Times Higher Education/QS World Rankings (2004), and over time by others, which subsequently acquired much significance.
The latter years of the last century and early years of this century are associated with the tail-end of a long period of economic growth, driven primarily by unregulated finance capital. The Economist referred it as âa golden age of stable growthâ (Editors 2007), while Arrighi (2010) described the âlong twentieth centuryâ as the era in which the financialisation of economic activity came to dominate relative to capital invested in production. This came to a tumultuous end with the global financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent Great Recession. It sparked off the steepest economic and social decline in 60 years across OECD countries (OECD 2009), with the âdepression phase [lasting] longer than 1929â1933â (Mason 2015, 3). Even before the recent global crisis, many OECD countries were facing challenges associated with competition for investment capital and what The Economist (Wooldridge 2006) called the âbattle for brainpowerâ. Demographic deficits across most developed countries, due to greying of the population and retirement of professionals, combined with the end of the âbaby boomerâ bubble and late childbirth to reduce the pool of secondary students. Correspondingly, there has been increased attention on employability competences of graduates and the economic necessity to widen participation. Demographic factors have challenged government strategies for growing knowledge-intensive sectors and ignited a world-wide battle for talent, in which international students and ambitious professionals, especially in science and technology and from elite universities, are highly sought after â as a source of income and specialist labour but also in recognition that mobile talent produces an important counter-weight â a ânew diasporaâ (Report of the High-Level Group 2010).
In contrast, growth in developing countries and economies in transition such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), has been relatively robust in both absolute and relative terms. The massification of Asian education, with targets to dramatically raise higher education participation rates, will transform universities and these economies, dominating future R&D growth and underpinning the expansion of a new middle class. These developments have the potential to overtake Europe and Japan, and eventually match US investment, due to the combination of availability of human capital and rising investment (Europa 2008; Cookson 2010). Over the next fifty years, changes in the world order are likely to intensify, as the âeconomic balance [shifts] towards emerging economies, particularly those in Asia, with the share in world GDP of non-OECD countries rising well beyond that of the current OECD area by 2060â (Braconier et al. 2014, 6). The Asian twenty-first century parallels the characterisation of the twentieth century as the American century, and the nineteenth century as the British century (Kohli et al. 2011).
As nations seek a route out of the current economic impasse, global competition is accelerating. If the first phase of globalisation was marked by âworking cheaperâ, the current phase is distinguished by the speed, interconnectedness and interdependence of the knowledge-economy paradigm as the core political project of the world economy (OECD 1996; Jessop 2012). A victim of the crisis in many countries, higher education is widely acknowledged as a key infrastructural piece of economic recovery and global positioning (DoT 2012; OECD 2012). In fact, higher education has become so important for national competitiveness that the state feels obliged to interfere more directly, balancing state regulation and the market to ensure better alignment with the national project (Dill 1998, 362; Meek 2002, 67). The huge costs associated with adopting and sustaining a competitive strategy illustrates how indicators of investment, especially in the bio-sciences and technology, as a percentage of GDP, have become powerful drivers of international benchmarking, resource-intensive competition and government policy (Froumin and Lisyutkin 2015, 252â253). It is also an indication that ability vs. inability to compete at this level is likely to amplify the global divide between economic regions âpolarized along an axis of opposition between productive, information-rich, affluent areas and impoverished areas, economically devalued and socially excludedâ (Castells 1996, 145). But even developed countries are finding it difficult to maintain their competitive position in the face of very significant increases in investment from neighbouring and emerging economies (OECD 2013, 196â220; 2014).
Globalisationâs biggest effect on higher education has been to transform it from a local institution to a one of geopolitical significance. Most universities owe their origins to nation- or city-building. But, ever since the success of Silicon Valley, policy makers around the world have sought to replicate the formula of cities or regions of knowledge with âhigh-tech innovation and productivity, magnets for the professional class, with powerful research universities as their intellectual centersâ (OâMara 2005, 225). The changing political economy of higher education has heightened the significance of internationalisation; once seen primarily as cultural exchange, it is now also conceived of as cross-border movement of knowledge, involved in global research networks as well as attracting talent and capital. In many cases, urban centres are no longer just part of national systems but have become an important part of the âglobal economic architectureâ which is âbeing consolidated, intensified and accelerated under contemporary conditions of globalisationâ (Brenner and Kell 2006, 5). As the distribution of economic activity has gone global, cities now compete on a global terrain; they are the âpreferred siteâ where financial and innovative specialised services are concentrated. As such, successful cities and city regions are those which attract the key resources of talent and capital, in sufficient quantity, to support the state-of-the-art buildings and social networking infrastructure essential to enable âfirms and markets to have global operationsâ (Sassen 2006, 91). There is a mutual interdependence and synergy with higher education.
Rankings reflect and structure the world economy and global science. Because they predominantly measure knowledge production and dissemination â in limited fields and in a traditionalist way â they provide competitive advantage to elite universities and nations which benefit from accumulated public and/or private wealth and investment. They perpetuate the hegemonic position of elite Anglo-American institutions most notably through the choice of particular indicators, which value English-language high-impact journals, and enduring circles of peers. As Cantwell argues (Chapter 18), rankings are effectively a âreport cardâ on the disparity in resources and the unevenness in the global production of knowledge, the effect of which is to legitimise such inequities. The widening gap between winners and losers â with private universities in the United States dominating the top-twenty â has conferred gate-keeper status on elite educational institutions, their host nations, and their graduates, because they are perceived as having the capability to boost oneâs status relative to others. In this environment, global rankings have assumed disproportionate significance.
Developed countries tend to regard global rankings as an affirmation of or an outright challenge to their (perceived) dominance within the global geography of higher education and knowledge production. Retaining oneâs position within the coveted top-100 (Table 1.1) is hugely valuable, in terms of status and reputation, ability to attract high-achieving students and faculty, investment and endowments, and political support:
The critical importance of these rankings should not be doubted. The perceived quality of the higher education system is a key factor in helping to attract inward investment. The rankings can also help Ireland to attract more international students, a lucrative business opportunity...
(Editors, The Irish Times 2009)
Rankings are becoming important to present Japan attractively and getting good students and good workers as the population declines. Thatâs the governmentâs motivation.
(Government policy researcher, Japan, quoted in Hazelkorn 2015, 188)
Change in other parts of the world is slow due to limits on what can be achieved without systemic changes to governance structures, academic culture and research capability. There are also time lags with respect to investment, outcomes and impact. But once one looks beyond the top group, the growing multi-polarity of higher education and scientific knowledge becomes apparent. Notable gains have been made by Asian countries, primarily China, due to a combination of targeted government investment strategies and changes in ranking methodology. And, when measured against population size, smaller countries, notably Switzerland, the Nordic countries, Netherlands and Israel, do particularly well (Chapter 13). Nonetheless, there is unlikely to be much change amongst the very top for some time given their historic head-start and accumulated advantage (Usher 2015).
Middle-income and developing countries tend to view rankings more benignly â not only as an accountability measure by which to openly benchmark performance, especially in societies without a strong quality assurance regime, but also as a gauge of international competitiveness, relative and actual (Chapter 7). In fact, one of the beneficial outcomes, first, of the knowledge-economy paradigm and then, rankings, has to been push investment in higher education to the top of the policy agenda. This was, after all, the rationale behind the initial Shanghai ranking, and the reason many countries and regions, such as India, Russia and the Middle East, have authorised customised national rankings. Thus, globalisation not only accentuates regional and socio-economic disparities but it arguably also provides an entry route into the world economy, thereby challenging some of the original assumptions of dependency theory which posited a simple binary distinction between developed/underdeveloped or centre/periphery nations (Cibils 2016). Events highlight a more complex, relational and âmessyâ set of interactions between the national and the global (Olds 2001, 8; Kauppinen and Cantwell 2014, 138â142), with consequently more nuanced and complex responses and reactions to rankings, as chapters in Part II of this volume show.
Even before the arrival of global rankings, the Bologna Process had sought to bring coherence to otherwise disparate European national systems, and create a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) that was attractive and competitive internationally. Through the Lisbon Agenda, the European Union announced its intentions of being the most dynamic economy in the world. The arrival of ARWU sent shock-waves through the political and higher education establishment, leading to design of the alternative U-Multirank. A decade later these anxieties remain: âEurope is no longer setting the pace in the global
Table 1.1 Number of institutions in global top-100: world regions in selected rankings (2004â2015)
race for knowledge and talent, while emerging economies are rapidly increasing their investment in higher educationâ (Europa 2011, 2). More recent phases of higher education modernisation and acceleration of research productivity, excellence and critical mass/concentration via the creation of the European Research Area (ERA) form vital parts of the process, corresponding to efforts for greater political and economic integration (Europa 2016; King 2009, 101â118). Europe 2020, and specifically Horizon 2020, have ear-marked EUR 80 billion to underpin research and innovation between 2014â2020, including significant funds to attract international scholars to Europe. Other projects include the realignment of higher education to policies for smart specialisat...
