Hungary’s big deal with ‘THE’ rankings: What’s going on?

Ellen Hazelkorn and Philip G Altbach  25 May 2024

On 22 April 2024, Times Higher Education announced that it had reached a “groundbreaking” agreement with the Hungarian Ministry of Culture and Innovation with the aim of “significantly strengthening, advancing and promoting its higher education sector”.

Times Higher Education (THE) will “carry out a detailed analysis of Hungary’s higher education system, analysing its current performance and benchmarking it with successful global education hubs based on THE’s gold standard World University Rankings and review this in light of the ministry’s ambitions”.

The Daily News in Hungary said the “government’s goal was to more than double the number of foreign students at Hungarian universities”.

What’s going on? If you thought THE simply produced a multi-annual set of university rankings, think again. Today, global higher education rankings are big profit centres for the companies owning them.

The ‘Big Three’ – Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), THE and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU or the Shanghai Ranking) – and others are in business to make money for their owners. The rankings are only part of the total enterprise – and perhaps a ‘loss leader’.

They are a way of luring customers to the profit centres. Institutions submitting their institutional data to the ranking empires should understand the entire enterprise. Caveat emptor.

A bit of history

Global university rankings emerged onto the world stage at a significant moment in the acceleration of globalisation, massification and the internationalisation of higher education and global science.

Since 2003, they have successfully generated considerable publicity by showcasing and comparing a university’s international standing at a time when their knowledge-producing and talent-attraction capabilities were becoming the essential currency of the global era.

Indeed, they helped define the global higher education and science system – which would have been impossible without comparative evidence. And, of course, in an era when more than six million students study beyond their own borders, the rankings are used to select where to study.

The geo-politicalisation of higher education and science accelerated in the decades following the arrival of global rankings. Many countries launched “academic star wars” – otherwise known as excellence initiatives – tied explicitly to improving the ranked position of their universities, and accordingly the country.

Despite significant criticism and an exodus from participation by a small number of institutions, global university rankings are widely used.

Ranking obsession persists across the world, even when the gap between position and ambition is unbridgeable.

Governments and universities across the Global South are especially vulnerable. Rankings prey on their anxieties and their desire to reach a wider audience, build ‘world-class universities’, and international students and investors. The collaborative arrangement between the government of Hungary and THE is illustrative of the rankers’ business model – with the Hungarians no doubt paying a high price.

Strategic use of data

The use of data for measurement and comparison stretches back to the foundations of the modern nation state in the late 19th century. The United States Bureau of Education began issuing reports on individual academic institutions in the 1870s, and the first accreditation agencies were established around 1900.

The OECD began compiling statistical information in 1961 and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics was established in 1999. Other historic landmarks were the Science Citation Index (1961) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (1966).

The strategic use of information is increasingly vital as governments and universities embrace an evidence-based decision-making approach. Without such information, it is not possible to govern, steer, develop, compare and monitor systems or institutions or achieve objectives and targets.

There are national systems, but no system for internationally reliable and comparable data is available. Thus, it is difficult to compare or benchmark universities. As a result, international rankings became a shorthand way of making such comparisons – and they are now used for a variety of purposes.

The business model

ARWU – created by Shanghai Jiao Tong University – was launched in 2003 in response to the ambitious agenda set by the Chinese government to raise research standards and create world-class universities. It was an overnight success. QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) started its rankings in 2004 in collaboration with THE – they split up in 2009.

Times Higher Education, a British-based higher education magazine, was bought by Inflexion Private Equity Partners in 2019. It has recently formed partnerships with international student services SI-UK (2020) and Studyportals (2020), and MBA-oriented Poets&Quants (2023).

Its acquisition of Inside Higher Ed (2022), an American news site, created a global enterprise.

ARWU is now operated by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy. As of 2024, the three global rankings are part of for-profit entities that provide a range of services to universities and others around the world. Global rankings are parts of a nexus of profit-making enterprises.

The same argument can be made for many national rankings. For example, the very influential US News and World Report rankings used to be a magazine but is now only a rankings agency, which includes not only colleges and universities but also healthcare, banking/finance, travel, cars, insurance, real estate, etc.

Over the last 20 years, the process of creating rankings has produced huge data sets with billions of data elements. Some of this information is drawn from publicly available sources supplemented by reputational surveys, and institutional submissions.

LinkedIn entered the rankings business using crowd-sourced data on graduate employment. With the main exception of the European Union’s U-Multirank, global rankings have always been a commercial enterprise.

The absence of internationally comparable data encouraged rankings to establish their own repositories. The Global Institutional Profiles project was created by Clarivate (2009) in partnership between THE and Thomson Reuters.

The involvement of the newly established data analytics industry, created to measure scientific productivity and the impact of individual academics, universities and systems and dominated by a few for-profit companies such as Scopus and Web of Science, has added to the measures that the ranking agencies can use.

In 2014, THE established DataPoints which now includes nine million data points from 3,500 institutions from over 100 countries, while Shanghai Ranking Consulting has created Global Research University Profiles.

A magnified quantum of data

Corporate consolidation between rankings, publishing and data analytics has magnified the quantum of data now held by the ranking companies. Access to these databases requires a subscription fee, even from the universities which supply their information for free.

Data collection, warehousing and analytics are a resource-intensive activity. Owning data-rich resources, as well as the sophisticated tools and associated services to capture and interpret data, is where the real money and power lies. As one ranker mentioned: “As you know that rankings themselves cannot make money, one has to find funding or make money to support ranking activities. It’s not an easy task.”

Leadership and management ‘thought leadership’ summits are organised by the ranking companies frequently throughout the year and around the world to showcase their consultancy prowess. These include workshops in data analysis and advice as to how to improve in the rankings.

Universities gladly host the event to soak up the glamour. As one person explains, the university pays “several hundred thousand euros just for the brand” – in other words for the opportunity to associate with the THE brand and all the ensuing publicity. In addition, they pay for “travel expenses for speakers, lunches, etc. And to my surprise, they [the rankers] also took all the money from the registration fee.”

Clearly it would be very difficult for a university to put on an event of this scale without ‘THE leverage’ and it provides an opportunity for the university to ‘promote its brand’ internationally.

THE consultancy services provide institutional rankings performance analysis, competitor analysis, stakeholder perceptions analysis, international strategy, global academic reputation analysis, strategy evaluation, brand health check and research network analysis. QS consultancy services similarly provide “unrivalled data, expertise and solutions”.

Good advice or conflict of interest?

Naturally, these arrangements are confidential, although THE proudly displays universities which have used its services. QS created India’s “first nationwide higher education rating system”, using the brand QS I-GAUGE. Shanghai had an agreement with North Macedonia to create an evaluation system; a similar request was made of QS for Dubai free-zone institutions.

There are growing allegations that advice leads to improved rankings. Is this the outcome of good advice or a conflict of interest? Is the growth of regional rankings, such as for the Middle East and North Africa or Africa, simply business expansion or a strategy of entrapment to lure countries and universities into consultancy deals with the promise of helping them improve?

Questions are often asked about the editorial ‘independence’ of THE, which regularly includes articles about rankings; for example, news of its consultancy deal with Hungary was published as if a news item in the paper.

What’s in it for Hungary?

Under the agreement with THE, a detailed analysis will be undertaken of Hungarian universities in terms of their performance in comparison with regional and global peers. The ministry will be able to access THE’s material on universities in over 100 countries worldwide in terms of education, research, nancial sustainability, international activities, social impact and scientic reputation data, in order to help Hungarian universities.

According to Hungary’s state secretary for higher education, the objective is to double the number of foreign students at Hungarian universities and have “a Hungarian university among the world’s 100 best by 2030, and at least three among Europe’s top 100”.

With the exception of Semmelweis University, which ranked around 250 in the THE ranking 2024, all other Hungarian institutions have either remained static or declined in performance over the years, ranging from around the 500 mark to over 1,200.

However, rising in the rankings is a very costly affair. Every action, except ensuring that each university academic uses the same affiliation, costs millions to effect any significant change in rank – and that’s before Hungary factors in THE’s hefty fee. Moreover, to move up, another university must move down.

The number of foreign full-time university students in Hungary showed a steady increase between 2009 and 2020, with most of the 32,000 students attracted by government scholarships, student-friendly visas and relatively cheap tuition for medicine, dentistry and veterinary education.

Hungary is no different from other countries in seeking to increase its international attractiveness – not only to international students and graduates who may settle in the country, but also those who form the new diaspora and can help build stronger international reputation and links.

But can it redeem or build up its profile after the years spent under the authoritarian rule of the Fidesz party which has systematically promoted an illiberal agenda?

Mutual benefits

Mutual self-serving benefits are created between governments or universities and the ranking consultancies. The former are reliant on the relationship leading to noticeable and quick improvements in their positioning, while the latter is dependent on ensuring such improvement, thus showcasing their worth and creating the basis for additional contracts.

Strategic use of data is here to stay – but without grappling with issues of data ownership, governance and regulation at a multilateral level – troublesome problems of transparency, accountability and ethics will remain.

Ellen Hazelkorn is joint managing partner, BH Associates education consultants. She is professor emeritus at the Technological University Dublin in Ireland, joint editor of Policy Reviews in Higher Education and international co-investigator for the Centre for Global Higher Education. Philip G Altbach (e-mail: [email protected]) is a professor emeritus and distinguished fellow of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education, USA.