Interesante columna de A. Usher sobre si concentrar o distribuir el presupuesto de la educación superior para crear una o pocas world class universities versus un mayor número de calidad pero que no sobresalen en el Ranking.
Concentration vs. Distribution
I’m spending part of this week in Shanghai at the bi-annual World-Class Universities conference, which is put on by the good folks who run the Shanghai Jiao Tong Rankings. I’ll be telling you more about this conference later, but today I wanted to pick up on a story from the last set of Shanghai rankings in August. You’d be forgiven for missing it – Shanghai doesn’t make the news the way the Times Higher Education rankings does, because its methodology doesn’t allow for much change at the top.
The story had to with Saudi Arabia. As recently as 2008, it had no universities in the top 500; now it has four, largely because of the way they are strategically hiring highly-cited scientists (on a part-time basis, one assumes, but I don’t know that for sure). King Saud University, which only entered the rankings in 2009, has now cracked the top-200, making it by far the fastest rise of any institution in the history of any set of rankings. But since this doesn’t line up with the “East Asian tigers overtaking Europe/America” line that everyone seems eager to hear, no one published it.
You see, we’re addicted to this idea that if you have great universities then great economic development will follow. There were some surprised comments on twitter about the lack of a German presence in the rankings. But why? Whoever said that having a few strong top universities is the key to success?
Strong universities benefit their local economies – that’s been clear for decades. And if you tilt the playing-field more towards those institutions – as David Naylor argued in a very good talk last spring, there’s no question that it will pay some returns in terms of discovery and innovation. But the issue is one of opportunity costs: would such a concentration of resources create more innovation and spill-over benefits than other possible distributions of funds? Those who make the argument for concentration (see, for instance, HEQCO’s recent paper on differentiation) seem to take this as given, but I’m not convinced their case is right.
Put it this way: if some government had a spare billion lying around, and the politics of regional envy wasn’t an issue, and they wanted to spend it in higher education, which investment would have the bigger impact: putting it all into a single, “world-class” university? Spreading it across maybe a half-dozen “good” universities? Or spreading it across all institutions? Concentrating the money might do a lot of good for the country (not to mention the institution at which it was concentrated – but maybe dispersing it would do more. As convincing as Naylor’s speech was, this issue of opportunity costs wasn’t addressed.
Or, go back to Shanghai terminology: if it were up to you to choose, do you think Canada would be better served with one institution in the top ten worldwide (currently – none) or seven in the top 100 (currently – four) or thirty-five in the top 500 (currently – twenty-three)? And what arguments would you make to back-up your decision? I’m curious to hear your views.
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