College rankings influence colleges' decisions worldwide

A recent international survey of academics confirmed the love-hate relationship between universities and high-profile annual rankings like those issued by U.S. News & World Report. Perhaps surprisingly, the survey also found that U.S. News’ rankings, which are by far the most well-known in the United States, command relatively little respect abroad.

The survey, released earlier this month by research firm Thomson Reuters, was conducted online with a group of 350 university administrators, staff and students, mostly from Britain and the United States, but also from other parts of Europe, Asia and Australia.

The study indicated that, though the higher-education community finds such rankings valuable, its members often have reservations about their usefulness or methodologies. A total of 85 percent of respondents considered rankings at least “somewhat useful,” but nearly three-quarters of respondents believed that institutions “manipulate their data to move up in the rankings,” and two-thirds of those polled said that “only institutions that have been ranked highly continue to be ranked highly.”

“A concern found in the survey, and echoed in discussions with representative groups, was that published ranking tables could have more insidious effects,” wrote Jonathan Adams and Kathy Baker, the study’s authors.

The authors argued that the prevalence of rankings affects universities’ actions.

“They changed the behavior, even the strategy, of institutions, not to become more effective, but to perform well against arbitrary ranking criteria,” they wrote.

The survey found that, though 95 percent of North American academics were “very familiar” with the U.S. News rankings, only 44 percent of the study’s respondents worldwide were familiar with the list. Respondents outside the United States were more familiar with a pair of global rankings: the British Times Higher Education World University rankings and the Chinese Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The Times Higher Education rankings were recognized by 72 percent of survey respondents and were recognized by more than half of the respondents in each region listed in the study: North America, Europe, Australia/New Zealand and Asia. The ARWU was closer to the U.S. News rankings in terms of global recognition, with 49 percent of respondents familiar with it.

While Princeton tied Harvard for the top spot in the most recent U.S. News rankings, the University didn’t fare as well in the other major rankings. Princeton placed eighth in both the Times Higher Education and the ARWU rankings — seven spots behind Harvard, which topped both lists. Yale, which placed third in the Times Higher Education rankings, placed 11th in the ARWU.

Though the authors said concerns about the effect of rankings were reported at similar frequencies across regions, they said a concern specific to Asia was that the current analyses generally favored institutions in English-speaking nations.