Office of Science & Technology - Beyond Rankings: Towards Benchmarking of Tertiary Education Systems

Beyond Rankings: Towards Benchmarking of Tertiary Education Systems

bridges vol. 26, July 2010 / Feature Article

By Jamil Salmi

Not every benefit can be shown in numbers: Education cannot be divided by inches and feet.

In 1963, the faculty and administration at the University of California at Berkeley strongly objected when the campus' radical student newspaper, the Cal Reporter, took the initiative to publish student evaluations of their courses and professors.¹ Despite this initial resistance, student evaluations have steadily become part and parcel of many universities' internal accountability mechanisms, not only in the US but in a growing number of countries around the world. Today there are even web sites where any student can post a rating of his/her professors, no matter where in the world. More generally, over the past 20 years, universities that had traditionally enjoyed considerable autonomy are now being challenged to become more accountable for their performance and the use of public resources. Demands for increased accountability on the part of tertiary education institutions have come not only from the students, but also from other stakeholders such as governments wary of rising costs, employers in need of competent graduates, and the public at large eager for information about the quality of education and labor market prospects.

Accreditation, cyclical reviews, external evaluation by peers, inspection, audits, performance contracts based on predetermined indicators, benchmarking, and research assessments are among the most common forms of achieving accountability. Some are initiated by the institutions themselves; some are imposed on tertiary education institutions by external funding bodies, quality assurance agencies, committees of presidents and vice chancellors, as well as stakeholders at large. One example of the latter is institutional rankings by "league tables." At this point, there are no fewer than 45 noteworthy rankings, ranging from broad rankings of national universities, such as Maclean's and US News & World Report, to comprehensive international rankings, such as the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), to others that research specific rankings, such as those of New Zealand and the UK. There are even idiosyncratic rankings such as those that claim to identify the most wired or most politically active campuses; and these do not even include the countless MBA and other professional school rankings that exist all over the world.

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