Ranking of universities in India: Systemic weaknesses and signals from US universities
Quality education transforms families, societies, and nations. Any effort to judge quality of higher education should be welcomed. As expected, announcement of ranking of Indian universities by National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) on 5 June 2023 was accompanied by celebrations across campuses scoring high ratings. Now that the euphoria and congratulatory traffic on social media has ebbed, let us analyse the way rankings have evolved and the purpose they serve.
Ranking started in USA
Around 1980 high school (equivalent of 10+2 in India) students and parents in USA started looking for good colleges and universities beyond the home state for admission to undergraduate programmes. To fill this knowledge gap US News and World Report started ranking top US universities in 1983. Annual college/university rankings have been regularly released since 1988. Other players in this game are College Board and other organisations which administer standardised tests (like SAT, PSAT, ACT and other scores). During last three decades an elaborate marketing machine has evolved which sells colleges and universities to students, internet industry, testing companies and rating magazines which shape the playing field on which the admission seekers step on. In 2018 alone, US colleges and universities spent US$ 10 billion on recruiting students.
Many US colleges and universities have gone to great lengths to move up the rankings to attract brilliant and other (high fee paying, top athletes, children of alumni, etc.) students to undergraduate programmes. This has produced much-touted low selectivity (% of admission seekers selected) by top ranked universities. One example of stiff competition: For 1700 spots in top-ranked Harvard University’s class of 2019, there were 26,000 applicants, including 8,200 (more than 4.5 time the admission slots) with perfect GPA and 3,500 (more than double the admission spots) with perfect Math SAT score, yet 350 selected applicants did not join.
NIRF ranking of Indian universities
Metrics used for rating are Teaching, Learning and Resources; Research and Professional Practice; Graduate Outcomes; Outreach and Inclusivity; and Peer Perception. These metrics have further sub-metrics. Mathematical formulae are used to calculate score for each metric and the overall score. University XXXX is given a score like 63.09 to create an allusion that the system is quantitative, objective, and transparent.
Some of these metrics were initially used by US News (and other ranking agencies) but have been discarded due to bias, distortions, and irrelevance. Others like representation of economically and socially backward classes do not make sense in Indian context due to legal reservations.
Although the primary objective of ranking is to measure the quality and relevance of undergraduate education, the metrics do not adequately reflect these. At the end of the day what matters the most is the quality of teaching in classrooms, laboratories, and workshops. How a teacher motivates, trains, challenges, and evaluates students to gain new knowledge and use it in real world situations, is critical. Learning must not be viewed as a ‘product’ to be ‘delivered’ by a teacher to students. Rather, learning is what emerges from their collaborative effort of listening, questioning, risk-taking and other subtle nuances. It is difficult to measure, forget about quantification. If students reckon, they can score decent grades by generating business for the class-notes-photocopying shop on the campus, it should worry the deans about the quality of teaching. Any university which rewards research-focussed professors over enthusiastic teachers, relegates teaching to second priority. Inbred faculty, a serious weakness in several universities, is swept under the carpet.
Undergraduate education (for which the ranking was originally designed) is not a priority area for some highly ranked universities in India and USA. Strait-jacket cookie-cutter NIRF approach evaluates single campus institutes/universities on the same parameters as the traditional general universities whose primary undergraduate function is to affiliate colleges and conduct examinations. It is also unfair to assess them on the same parameters for outreach as other universities for which outreach (extension) is a mandatory and funded responsibility. The general universities perform a larger public-good function but are often handicapped for undertaking research due to lack of sponsored research funding through All India Coordinated Research Projects. Much of their research is through arduously won time-bound competitive grants.
A bigger problem in India is unavailability of authentic and independently verifiable information about ranking metrics in public domain like Department of Education, College/University’s Common Data Set, College Navigator, College Possible and College Advising Corps in USA. The system is vulnerable to misuse due to outdated and/or incorrect data and methodologies. Unlike US, India does not have a robust audit and stiff penalties against misuse and misrepresentation. A brand-name US university Dean was fined US$ 250,000 for artificially inflating his programme’s rating. Celebrity parents and their facilitators were punished by US courts for managing their children’s admissions in Ivy League Universities. In the absence of stiff penalties and prompt action, some universities may be exaggerating achievements and hiding weaknesses like vacant positions, delayed revision of UGC salaries, treatment of contractual and newly recruited professors like bonded labour, prolonged leadership vacuum, and uncertainty due to tussle between State Chief Ministers and Governors in some states.
Divergence between the latest NIRF and World QS rankings of Indian universities reflect inherent infirmities in ranking systems.
Brand name US universities exiting ranking
A view is emerging in the US that the ranking tail is wagging the dog. In 2022, 17 medical colleges and 62 law colleges (including 14 highest ranked) opted out of the ranking race. Ironically, a day after release of NRIF rankings, Columbia University (tied at second place with Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021–22) exited the ranking.
University admissions
Teachers, students, and the ecosystem in which knowledge is imparted and evaluated determine the quality of graduates produced. Unlike university admission being 2–3 weeks process in Indian universities, it is a year-long elaborate exercise overseen by Admissions Dean. For Indian universities, merit for admission is synonymous with entrance test and/or School Board scores. Merit parameters for admission in US universities are much broader and include school grades, rigour of high school curriculum, athletic ability, extracurricular activities, letters of recommendation, intellectual curiosity, race, economic condition of family (to admit students from poor families), legacy status and standardised test (SAT, PSAT, ACT and AP) scores. For transparency they use a Common Application. Before admission officers evaluate an application, it is filtered, reviewed, and massaged by pre-readers and machines, and assimilated into components which are easy to scan. Applicants are assessed in a ‘holistic fashion’ covering academic, extracurricular, personality, leadership, potential and other aspects. A 2009 study concluded that an Asian American student (access to better schools, more extracurricular opportunities, better learning opportunities at home) needed to score 140 more points on SAT (Indian equivalent of entrance test) than a white applicant and 450 more points than a black student to have an equal chance of admission to an elite university to shape a racially balanced and diverse class for better education outcomes.
Lately, some brand name US universities, including Columbia, have made the test scores optional or dumped them completely.
Quality of Graduates
Graduate outcomes, based on pass-out numbers, are one of the five metrics used by the NIRF. Excessive focus on number of Ph.Ds. produced may lead to churning out half-baked doctorates. We do not seem to have learned lessons from University Grants Commission making Ph.D. an essential qualification for recruitment of lectures/assistant professors in 1976.
With future jobs in private sector, quality of graduates produced is critical. Good jobs exist in the country, but the booming public and private education sector does not adequately prepare students to do them. Only 30 per cent new graduates in India are employable. Latest example: India is home to 40 per cent of 4,000 high-end multi-disciplinary Global Capability Centres world-wide, contributing one per cent of GDP in 2022–23. Recruiting competent graduates is their main headache. This should worry the government, universities, and colleges.
NIRF ranked Punjab Agricultural University as Number 1 among State Agricultural Universities. Others (GADVASU, Punjabi Univ. and Guru Nanak Dev Uni.) may not have scored top ranks but continue to fill critical gaps, particularly in undergraduate education, despite serious handicaps and formidable challenges.
