Oswald, Andrew J.

English

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University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrapThis paper is made available online in accordance with publisher policies. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item and our policy information available from the repository home page for further information.  To see the final version of this paper please visit the publisher’s website. Access to the published version may require a subscription. Author(s): Oswald, Andrew Article Title: An Economist's View of University League Tables Year of publication: 2001 Link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9302.00265 Publisher statement: The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com  An Economist’s View of University League TablesMay 2001Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics, University of WarwickMany newspapers and magazines now publish league tables ofuniversities.  They do this because it sells extra copies of theirpublications.  All over the world, school-teachers pin these tables upon notice-boards.Human beings are fascinated by rankings.  It is presumably forDarwinian reasons: your many-times great grandfather came high upa pecking order and that is why you are still here.  Even in games,like football or table tennis, people have to construct leagues.Economists have a generic view: most of the time if you allow peopleto be free the world will come out well.  How does that do in the caseof university league tables?  My view is: poorly.  This is a case, likepollution from a smoky factory, where private actions cause bad‘externalities’ on others.The main issue, here and throughout much of what we have seen inpublic sector regulation in the last decade, is what might be describedas the conflict between informing the consumers and dishearteningthe employees.Say we take the Financial Times league table of universities.  It rates97 universities on a set of 16 criteria.  These are the average A-levelscores of the entering students, the ratio of applications to places, thestaff-student ratio, research quality as assessed by the governmentResearch Assessment Exercise, teaching quality as measured by theof Quality Assurance Agency, percentage of first class degrees, theemployment rate of leaving students, percentage of students enteringprofessional training, percentage of graduates going on to a higherdegree, percentages of students going into research degrees andtaught masters degrees, percentage of overseas students, per-capita2university income from industry, research grant income per capita,computer expenditure per capita, and library expenditure per capita.It sums the outcomes from these criteria, assigns weights withoutexplaining how it chooses those, and publishes a league table.  In itsmost recent table, the University of Cambridge came top and theUniversity of Paisley came bottom.Point 1.  University league tables use a method that would not betolerated by journalists to create a league table of newspapers.The reason is that things of marginal significance are given a largeweight.  If we were to rate newspapers in a league table, it might benatural to put 80% weight on the quality of the writing, and let theother 20% be determined by an assortment of things such as type offont, use of colour, the attractiveness of adverts, delivery lags, and soon.  But this is not what happens with university league tables.Research and teaching – the main functions of a university – are incombination given only about 25% of the weight in the normal leaguetable.  At best, this is strange.  At worst, it is absurd.Point 2.  University league tables are currently of little use to policy-makers because they reveal nothing about efficiency.For example in 2001, according to the FT, Oxford had the singlelargest spending per student on libraries: 1100 pounds per-capitacompared to a norm for British universities of about 300 pounds.From the economist’s point of view, society needs to know where it isgetting the biggest bang for its library buck.  For a given quality ofresearch and teaching, universities should be congratulated if theyuse few resources.  That is what efficiency means.  Yet universityleague tables reward the opposite.Point 3.  The people who actually work in universities, the academics,would not rank universities in the way done by newspapers.For hundreds of years, the quality of a person’s research has beenthe over-riding criterion for promotion and hiring.  Those outsideuniversities often find this puzzling or worse.  Yet the norm has grownup not because of any conspiracy or mistake.  Rather, universitiesthrough the ages have learned that the contribution of a scholar is3mainly through the ideas that he or she leaves in the minds of thenext generation.  British citizens and politicians never think to ask:where do the ideas in high school textbooks actually come from?The answer, though, is from universities.  One of my friends hardlysees a student, but he will be one of the most important teachers thatBritish economics has ever produced – when his ideas reach thetextbooks that your grandchildren will read at age 15.Point 4.  League tables create perverse incentives.For example, universities now feel under pressure to give more andmore Firsts.  Yet it is advisable for a society to give its institutions ofhigher education the incentive to set tough standards.Point 5.  There is a serious problem in Britain caused by thedisheartening effects of university league tables.How would you feel about working in Britain’s 94th best university?  Itis unlikely that, for teams, there is a sports league table anywhere inthe world with 100 members.  My research on stress and jobsatisfaction in the public sector* has found a marked deterioration inmental wellbeing through the 1990s.  This is true generally, notmerely in the education sector.  Although I am not yet able toconstruct a formal test, my judgment is that much of this fall in moralein the public sector is because of what might be termed the publichumiliation that has been a feature of the 1990s.Human beings are ill-equipped to deal with low status.  People drawselectively on evidence around them to build comforting ways ofviewing themselves and what they do.  According to surveys, there isbarely a man in England who is much less than 6 feet tall.  This ishuman; it is not to be looked down upon.Efficiency is important.  But we have little idea what happens to publicsector workers when these psychological defence mechanisms aretaken away.  Politicians who advocate the use of naming andshaming do not seem to have noticed that it is not done in the bastionof efficiency: the private sector.  If you work for BT as a manager,your job performance is carefully evaluated and you have manymeetings with your boss to discuss how you are doing.  But the4results are not published in the local newspaper for your neighboursto read.  If we are to have good people in our public-sector, the jobshave to be attractive.  That has been forgotten.Where might university league tables go next?  Academics rateuniversities virtually entirely by their research.  Students rateuniversities largely by whether they will have an enjoyable experiencethere.  Parents rate universities by the employability they produce intheir offspring, the safety of the campus, and the status that theuniversity buys them.Britain needs a wider range of rankings.  My view is that, as in theUnited States, pressures will grow to create diversity and sub-leagues.  Hence I expect to see the British newspapers of the futurepublish three or four leagues within their Good Universities specialissue.  It is not sensible to rank Cambridge and Paisley within onetable.  They have different tasks and should be judged with that itmind.  It is a particular mistake for our country to leave the studentsand staff of Paisley feeling bad about themselves; their contribution tosociety is large.  I also expect to see a move to the ranking of smallerunits such as all of the British departments of economics or classics.Such rankings would be more useful to students (as one or twonewspapers are starting to recognise).  Averaging across pineapplesand grapes does not make sense.We have to be realistic.  These kinds of rankings, in some form, arehere to stay.  Britain is a free country and newspapers can publishwhat they wish.  But I believe that university league tables currentlydo more harm than good.• “What Has Been Happening to Job Satisfaction in Britain?” By Jonathan Gardnerand Andrew Oswald, March 2001, downloadable from www.oswald.co.uk.I thank Paul Greatrix of Warwick University for helpful suggestions, but am solelyresponsible for the opinions expressed here.

An economist's view of university league tables

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/338/1/WRAP_Oswald_leaguetablespmm.pdf

An economist's view of university league tables

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