Impact of University Ranking on Students

1. Impact of University Ranking on Students Syed Ali Khayam

2. What is this talk about? • This talk is based on the following report published recently on the NUST website: Marguerite Clarke, “University rankings and their impact on students,” • In this report, the author explains her perspective on how university rankings affect: • students’ choice of school • employment options after graduation, and • admission policies

3. What is this talk about? • Many different university rankings exist in the world today • Most prominent US rankings are: • US News & World Report College and University Ranking • Top American Research Universities by University of Florida • Washington Monthly College rankings … • Global rankings include: • Times Higher Education Ranking • Academic Ranking of World Universities • Newsweek Top 100 Global Universities • Webometrics Ranking of World Universities… • Most of these rankings use some well-known evaluation metrics to quantify the performance of postgraduate programs

4. Do students care about university rankings? • This study concludes that most students do not consider rankings to be important when choosing undergraduate and graduate schools • Out of the 221,897 undergraduate students who responded to one survey, 11% saw university rankings as a very important factor in their choice of school while 60% found them not at all important • I believe that this observation is largely dependent on the demographics of the survey participants • For instance, good students in Pakistan are very rank-conscious when picking graduate schools

5. Does university ranking affect employability? • The study concludes that university rank might have an impact on salary, especially for business schools • But this affect is only temporary • I believe that salary alone is not sufficient to gauge employability • We need to take into consideration whether the graduates are getting the jobs of their choice or not

6. Impact of university ranking on student access • To improve university ranking, schools offer early-decision programs and large amounts of scholarships, and invest heavily in infrastructure such as sports facilities and upmarket dorms • This has a negative impact on access for low-income students and other underrepresented groups as these students are less likely to apply through early-decision programs or to earn top scores on standardized tests • I am not really sure what this point means

7. Impact of global university rankings • Global rankings are providing students low-cost alternatives for quality education • There are reservations that some countries “see rankings and stratification as the means to create ‘world class’ universities and thus meet the challenges of increasing global competition” • I am again not really sure why this is a bad idea

8. Conclusion • Due to limited time, I could not read and analyze alternative perspectives on this subject • However, I found another, very useful article from the same author: Clarke, M. (2002). Quantifying quality: What can the U.S. News and World Report rankings tell us about the quality of higher education? Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10(16). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n16/ • This article critically analyzes the university ranking system of US News and highlights many important issues and pitfalls

9. Thank you!