World Bank tries different tertiary rankings

There can be few things that draw so much national attention in the tertiary sector as international university rankings. Depending on their place in them, institutions either trumpet their results or dismiss them as not being of any importance. But what they don’t tell you is that much about the health of a country’s tertiary education sector as a whole – and that is a gap Jamil Salmi, the World Bank’s tertiary education co-ordinator, is hoping to fill with a new rankings model. “The idea is to move away from focusing on the performance of individual institutions and look at the entire system and separate the performance of the system and its results, and the determinants of the drivers of these results,” Salmi told Campus Review, shortly after giving an hour-long presentation on international rankings to Universities Australia last week. It’s not that Salmi thinks the current array of university ranking systems are without merit – indeed in some countries they have been used to identify corruption, not just poor academic performance –but that they do not offer the full picture. His model, based on “benchmarking” – comparing performance in different areas as well as looking at wider factors – would produce an image of a national system that could be useful to both government policy makers and international students looking for a university. “We should not dismiss rankings all together but we should accept that they are only one piece of the overall accountability movement,” he said. “I think the audience of the rankings is more institutions themselves, and of course students and parents, where as our audience will be more national level policy makers.” The World Bank system would look at multiple elements of the national system as a whole: are equity goals being satisfied, how many people are being trained, what is the position of academic freedom. Is the system mainly public, like Australia, or predominantly private, like Korea. It’s trying to understand what are the different processes that lead to a good or bad performance, and recognise the complexity of systems and get beyond thinking that if you throw more public money at the system you get better results,” said Salmi. “If you are thinking about expanding your system, you need to think not only about public money but about private contributions, about different institutions, about student aid, about the incoming flow of students from secondary schools … the idea behind benchmarking is to establish causal relationships and understand what drives what results.” The bank has already begun testing its system with universities in the east-Asia region, bringing in local policy makers and researchers to the process, although a final launch date is somewhere in the future. “It’s overall been a very positive reaction,” said Salmi. “The shift to system-wide considerations was very important, there had been too much emphasis in their minds on the rankings and this could allow people to take a step back and have a broader view of these issues.” Building a world-class university and improving tertiary education systems is unsurprisingly a key concern of the World Bank’s education blog, where Salmi is a contributor, along with other leading bank education bureaucrats. While not very old, the blog, along with its stablemates, has proved popular and useful, Salmi said. “I think if you reach out to a wider audience, it allows you to put some reflections about current events much faster than when you write a formal paper, and to solicit comments,” he said. “I think it brings you closer to the community, it’s much faster, and I think it’s a very important and useful complement to traditional ways of communicating the results of our work.” The immediacy of blogging allows a faster reaction to major events, while the platform itself gives a voice to people who in the past never would have been able to speak to a World Bank employee about the things that affect their lives. “Our main audience is the developing world and we do indeed get reactions from people that we would not get before,” he said. “Also, part of our policy is to put all our publications free of charge online, even our books, there is a PDF free of charge online, so we can reach out to people in communities that don’t necessarily have the resources that others do.” Visit the World Bank’s education blog at http://blogs.worldbank.org/education/