Day 50: Ranking

My nephew has been accepted at the 2 universities that he applied to for his Master's in Economics.  He was asking Fianna which one he should go to and one of the first criteria people think of when assessing universities is: "How are they ranked ?"  Is that really a meaningful question? The short answer is no!  The purpose of universities is twofold:

1. to educate students
2. to advance human knowledge through research

I don't think rankings have anything to do with either of these two outcomes.  Rankings are highly subjective and very much self reinforcing, they are also counterproductive.   The main purpose of the University ranking system seems to be to ensure the reproduction of the existing elites.  The top ranked universities have a disproportionate amount of students from privileged backgrounds. And the students from these universities can command better jobs and better salaries thanks to that school "branding".  I would argue that elite education and university rankings have replaced titles as a marker of social positioning.  If you go to Harvard, Oxford or Polytechnique you are the equivalent of a Duke.  If you go to University of Florida, Sussex or Strasbourg  you are the equivalent of a Count. If you go to a non ranked university you are a Knight and finally if you don't go to university you are effectively a serf.

As you may have gathered from my earlier blog posts I have a certain hostility to privilege of any kind.  So I would like all university rankings abolished. Instead, since we are in the Internet era, let us have a social media version of the ranking system like on AirBnB or BlaBlaCar.  Students would give universities a ranking from 1 to 5 stars which would reflect their learning experience. The resulting assessments would be useful to students as one criteria amongst many to decide on where to go to university but would probably be irrelevant to recruiters. 

So my advice to my nephew is choose the one which has the most interesting programme, the most diverse student body, the best environment and most important ... The best food. (Today was a fasting day!)