Why the ‘World’ Rankings results won’t get us down

At least they asked the senior academics, because hopefully by this point their prejudices will be so deeply rooted as to be uninfluenced by anything so frivolous as objective reasoning. Though how anyone can objectively decide with significant accuracy how “powerful global university brands” are, is beyond the realms of my understanding.

An interesting conundrum is how the chosen few actually make their decisions. Maybe they look up the Official World Rankings to help get themselves going. This, one can only imagine, is followed by the ancient and equitable ritual of googling their own Wikipedia page (self-penned), finding the list of all the universities they previously worked at, and arranging them in descending order based on how good the beef bourguignon was in the cafeteria.

At least we can trust the BBC to tell us what it all means, right? That long-standing pillar of impartiality?

Alack. You see apparently, “There were 12 UK universities in the global top 100 in 2011 when the tables were published for the first time. Now there are nine.”

Leeds, it seems, have fallen out of the top 100 for the first time since records began way back in 2011. If this downward spiral continues, they may even have to reconsider whether weed and X-box really are the secret ingredients their undergraduates need to become world-class academics.

Powerful brand? Errrm, who has the better line in stylish sportswear Cambridge?

Shockingly these stories have been wafted under the noses of the Anti-Willetts Army to induce the kind of frothy-lipped expostulations that were heard throughout the Tuition-fee saga.

As it happens, I’m not a particular advocate of students paying more, but the idea that “the government should take a long hard look at its policies” based on a fairly meaningless table that Times Higher Education have used to pad-out their rankings portfolio, is, quite frankly, absurd.

Assuming we are to give this table any credence at all, however, some clue as to why Britain’s sacred Schools of Thought have been displaced from the top roster might actually begin to emerge: “We are seeing a trend of Asian universities rising, making more of a mark globally,” said Mr Baty.