Turning the tables

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by Conor Ryan

The most heated debate among delegates privately at the HEFCE conference is about league tables. In some countries – such as Germany and Australia – there are official tables in place for universities. But in the UK, the absence of such official data has led newspapers to do their own, with varying results.

So, when new research was published today showing ‘room for improvement’, many vice-chancellors probably felt that this was an understatement. Yet when universities do well in the tables, most are not shy about sharing the results, and there is a realisation that students want objective quality indicators.

The research from the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI) at the Open University and Hobsons Research showed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the tables only reflect what is included in them. And these tend to be reputational factors such as entry qualifications, the number of firsts and 2:1s and Research Assessment Exercise grades, rather than measures of quality. As a result, some produce non-standardised results. But it also found that universities are strongly influenced by the tables, many using them as key performance indicators.

William Locke, Assistant Director at CHERI told the conference that the tables should be updated to reflect social responsibility, environmental impact and online learning, and urged that the tables should allow interactivity to enable people to rank universities by their own priorities.

Line Verbik, Research Manager of Hobsons when the study was compiled, explained how the researchers at examined the impact in six HEIs – they found that league tables had a big impact on institutional behaviour, sometimes helping to set strategic priorities, although there was a reluctance to acknowledge the extent of its impact. Institutions wanted more transparency and more value-added measures.

Ms Verbik said that league tables were used most by young students and those from overseas, though they were only part of the decision-making process. They also influenced academic decisions about which universities they were willing to work in. Alternatives included the German system which grouped institutions rather than individually ranking them, or following the Berlin principles for greater transparency and comparability.

Five tables were analysed for the study – those used for the Sunday Times, Times and Guardian University Guides in the UK and the international studies published by Times Higher Education and Jiao Tong University Institute of Higher Education in Shanghai.

The perversity of some league table findings was highlighted by John Brooks, vice-chancellor of Manchester Metropolitan University, who said that reputational factors had led a joint architecture course it runs with the University of Manchester to be ranked very differently for each university on one national newspaper’s tables, leading to four times as many applications for the same course to the University of Manchester as to MMU (even though the paper corrected the error online within days).

The researchers urged universities to do more to inform students and the public about the league tables. David Eastwood said that “league tables are here to stay” but HEFCE’s role remained one of compiling data and had no plans to replace commercial league tables.

But, shouldn’t the question for vice-chancellors be not whether league tables should exist – because they can’t be wished away – but how can they collectively develop an authoritative set of measures that avoids many of the pitfalls highlighted in today’s research, as those used in Germany?

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