As a Cambridge applicant, I scoured the internet for information about my potential future university. Rankings were especially exciting: concrete, objective, and gave universities measurable prestige. Coming from the Czech Republic where the top university is listed between 401 and 500 in The Times Higher Education rankings, the quantifiable prestige of foreign universities gave them an exciting ring.

After studying at Cambridge for a term, I still inadvertently feel proud when seeing it rank so highly. But the longer I spend here, the more I question whether rankings do more harm than good. This October, The Times published its annual University ranking, with Cambridge coming fifth worldwide for a second year running. The University rejoiced, saying that it was pleased to place so highly. But surely, the strengths and weaknesses of universities cannot be as easily compared as such rankings make out.

“But the longer I spend here, the more I question whether rankings do more harm than good”

Recently, rankings have come under scrutiny in a report by a UN Independent Expert Group, which criticised them for being non-transparent, sloppy, and sometimes even invalid. They said that rankings are biased towards the English language, certain types of research, and STEM subjects. Even quantifiable categories that rankings measure universities by, like amounts of academic citations, are not as straightforward as they seem. One small university in Germany - Bielefeld University - jumped from place 250 to 166 in THE rankings in a single year: not due to any structural changes, or massive improvements, but thanks to one single academic collaboration involving a large amount of academic citations. Does that mean that the university is really 90 points ‘better’?

Rankings measure all universities with the same metrics without taking into account their available resources, historic privilege, and diverse social, economic, and political contexts and goals. And they measure universities in categories like employability and ratio of international to national students – neither of which have any impact over the education universities offer.

One of the reasons why rankings carry so much weight is because top universities constantly promote them. The world’s leading academic institutions, which normally act as safeguards of fact and objectivity, embrace rankings when they succeed, giving them academic pseudo-validity. Every year, Cambridge picks out the rankings that assess it favourably, splashing them all over its social media.

While they have their benefits – especially to members of high placed institutions like Cambridge – rankings are especially disadvantageous to lower status universities: schools which are much more likely to be home to high achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The real world impacts of rankings are far from dismissible. Recently, the UK announced a new High Potential Individual visa programme, making it considerably easier for graduates of 42 listed world universities to move to the UK. The programme assumes that these graduates’ ‘potential’ is higher than that of students from other institutions. How were these 42 institutions picked? For their rankings.

“Rankings are especially disadvantageous to lower status universities”

Rankings also give ‘top’ universities a justification for their false sense of superiority. We don’t read rankings just to compare to compare Oxford and Cambridge: the real reason rankings have their guaranteed place in Oxbridge circles is because they give a seemingly scientific reason to look down on other institutions. Rankings can be self-fulfilling, attracting funding as well as motivated students and faculty to high ranking institutions. Still, there is something wrong about knowing that no matter who we are, graduating from Cambridge will give us prestige that few other schools in the world can offer.

On an institutional level, rankings remove incentive for top ranked universities to improve. Since universities in most countries are highly dependent on student tuition, the institutions’ main goal is to attract potential applicants. High ranking institutions’ reputations are so strong that there will always be an influx of students wishing to study there. This removes competition that could motivate schools to improve: to support students, modernise, or keep environmental commitments.

Universities’ positions in rankings have recently been shifting: Cambridge has dropped, often being overtaken by schools like LSE and St Andrews. Perhaps coming years will challenge the idea that Oxbridge is totally untouchable – but even if they do, these debates deserve little attention. It is unlikely that the shifts will change schools in public interest: the UN report found that competition between schools based on rankings merely results in resources being diverted away from their core academic functions.

Of course, rankings will always have influence. However, it is crucial for us – during our time at Cambridge and afterwards – to realise that rankings are not objective scoreboards. We cannot watch one university bypass another in real time as if it were a rowing competition on the Cam. And we cannot judge schools, and people, according to a number on an ultimately misinformed and pseudo-academic list.

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