The writer is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor of Biomedical Engineering, International Health and Medicine at Boston University. He tweets @mhzaman
Higher education is rarely in the news, except when the topic of discussion is fake degrees and the luminaries who flaunt them. Yet, last week was different. Higher education and the commission in charge of it was in the news, and not because it had anything to do with the diploma mill. It made the news because it came out with its annual (delayed by a year!) university rankings. There was a lot of discussion on social media about who made the list and who didn’t but a careful analysis of the whole ranking exercise, which I am sure did cost time and resources, shows inherent conflicts and contradictions, underlining poor conception, ill-organisation and a fundamental conflict of interest.
Academic institution rankings, an annual money-making ritual by newspapers and magazines, is often provocative, usually controversial and sometimes insightful. The watchword here is the exercise carried out by “newspapers and magazines”. From the QS rankings to the US News and World Report to the Times Higher Education Supplement, none of the rankings are carried out by a federally funded institution that is a custodian of higher education. How does an institution, that is federally funded, provide nearly all of the support to public sector institutions, and has a mandate of improving national higher education and research, gets to rank its own universities? Somehow the provider of the resources also judges based on who got the most resources.
Let us do a simple exercise here to illustrate the point. The university ranking system used by the HEC includes many criteria, the most important of which is labelled “research”. It is important to note that majority of research in Pakistan is supported by the HEC, and apparently in the eyes of the HEC, using that to rank has no conflict here. One can make similar arguments about the impact of the HEC in other criteria too. So, the HEC gives out grants to university research and other activities, and then ranks them based on the same grants! It is like a father having lots of sons, doling out cash to just a few of his favourite sons, and then deciding by a so-called ‘objective’ criteria, who the best son is, based on the amount of cash each son got from the father. Of course, there are daughters too, but true to our male-dominated tradition we barely acknowledge them, and it’s best if they do not appear in any conversations, no matter how capable.
Then, there was the remark by the HEC Chairperson, Dr Mukhtar Ahmad, who said “for students and parents, these rankings help provide guidelines in selection of universities according to disciplines they want to pursue”. There are several very serious problems with this line of thinking. First is the objectivity of the rankings that I mentioned above. Second, the rankings do not provide discipline-wise detail and are very broadly classified, so the statement is misleading and third, and perhaps the biggest problem, is this the HEC’s mandate? In a country where educational institutions are few and poorly structured, such ‘advice’ will have serious consequences for those institutions that are not among the favoured few. Interestingly, if a student does go to a particular university, based on this ‘advice’ and the next year the same university is no longer in the top-10, would the HEC be kind enough to send an apology letter for bad advice? A letter titled ‘Oops!’, maybe?
The HEC is a unique institution, similar to other honoured and prestigious national organisations around the world that are created to foster and sustain a culture of education, innovation, research and inquiry. The mandate should be to lift the state of higher education, not to pitch institutions against each other. It doesn’t suit the HEC, its position, or its mandate to create a ranking of institutions that it is entrusted to support and sustain.
The only real ranking the HEC should care about is whether or not the people of Pakistan put it at the top of the list of national institutions they are most proud of.
Published in The Express Tribune, June 2nd, 2015.
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