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University Rankings in Critical Perspective

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University Rankings in Critical Perspective
Brian Pusser, Simon Marginson

The Journal of Higher Education, Volume 84, Number 4, July/August

2013, pp. 544-568 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/jhe.2013.0022

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jhe/summary/v084/84.4.pusser.html

Access provided by University of Melbourne (30 Aug 2013 04:40 GMT)

 Brian Pusser
Simon Marginson

University Rankings
in Critical Perspective

This article addresses global postsecondary ranking systems by using critical-theoretical

perspectives on power. This research suggests rankings are at once a useful lens for study-
ing power in higher education and an important instrument for the exercise of power in
service of dominant norms in global higher education.

This article addresses two issues that are rarely linked in research on
higher education, global rankings and power. We have argued elsewhere
that rankings are poorly understood and that power has been neglected
in models of postsecondary behavior.1 In this article, we use two critical
approaches to power, Steven Lukes’s three-dimensional model (1974,
2005) and Foucault’s relations of power (Foucault, 1977; Marginson,
2008), to understand the nature of global university rankings and the
implications of those rankings for postsecondary policy making.
Rankings serve as a particularly useful lens for the study of power in
higher education, as they are used to confer prestige, in the allocation of

Brian Pusser is an Associate Professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Educa-
tion at the University of Virginia. He served as coeditor of Universities and the Public
Sphere: Knowledge Creation and State Building in the Era of Globalization (2011);
bpusser@virginia.edu. Simon Marginson is a Professor of Higher Education at the Uni-
versity of Melbourne, Australia, where he is located in the Centre for the Study of Higher
Education. Simon’s books include Markets in Education (1997), the coauthored Interna-
tional Student Security (2010), and the coedited Handbook on Globalization and Higher
Education (2011); s.marginson@unimelb.edu.au.

The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 84, No. 4 (July/August)

Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University
 University Rankings in Critical Perspective   545

resources, as a form of agenda setting, as a means of stratifying national

higher education systems, as a means of establishing hierarchical rela-
tions between nations, and as a lever to impose demands for account-
ability and normative adaptation. Furthermore, given the global fixation
with postsecondary league tables, and the equally globalized perception
of the importance of higher education in national and transnational eco-
nomic development, rankings offer a window into the ways in which
power shapes the contemporary relationship between states, institutions,
civil society, and social actors (Marginson, 2011; Pusser, 2011). Our
fundamental finding in this article is that a close analysis of global rank-
ings suggests they are dominated by powerful, intentionally-enacted
norms and distinct interests, to the degree that perhaps the greatest util-
ity in rankings is that they can serve as significant indicators of relations
of power and contest within states as those states provide and regulate
higher education. While some rankings operate in the global territory
outside states (e.g., webometrics), and many are generated by non-state
actors, all rankings have a recognizable relationship to state agendas in
that they can be utilized to compare the “performance” of one state sys-
tem against others and to compare institutions within nations with each
other.

Power in Postsecondary Research

The study of postsecondary institutions has relied on a narrow and
generally functionalist set of conceptual frameworks. For more than
three decades, the field has been dominated by positivist and rational
choice models (Baldridge, 1971; Hammond, 2004), neo-institutionalist
approaches (Clark, 1993; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Pfeffer & Salan-
cik, 1978), and new-managerialist approaches (Amaral, Magalhaes, &
Santiago, 2003; Kezar & Lester, 2009; Maassen, 2003; Reed, 2002). As
a result, much of the literature on politics and policy in higher education
has been decoupled from critical perspectives on the political economy
of postsecondary institutions. A central element, power (Lukes, 2005)—
drawn from the critical political and social philosophies that have
shaped other areas of postsecondary research—is largely absent from
research on institutions in higher education.
The relative lack of attention to power is due, in part, to the ways in
which scholars of higher education have borrowed theories and frame-
works from the sociology of organizations and from political science.
In the first case, while the works of Burton Clark, Paul DiMaggio, and
John Meyer are widely cited in postsecondary research, the work of
such political sociologists as Weber (1947), Blau (1955, 1970), Zald
546   The Journal of Higher Education

(1970), and Morrow (2006) has, until quite recently, had limited impact
on work in higher education. The frameworks drawn from the sociology
of organizations in general, and neo-institutionalist models in particular,
for research in higher education have infrequently employed politics or
power (Ordorika, 2003; Parsons, 1997; Pusser, 2008).
It is also the case that traditional scholarship in political science has
rarely addressed postsecondary institutions in much detail; even more
rare is work in the discipline approaching higher education from criti-
cal frameworks or with attention to power. In the latter two decades of
the 20th century, new research emerged that did apply positivist politi-
cal models to institutions more generally and, to a limited degree, to
schools (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Kingdon, 1984; Masten, 1995; Weingast
& Marshall, 1988). Much the same prevails with regard to emerging
research on higher education policy that has increasingly drawn from
models based in political science (Doyle, 2006; Lane & Kivisto, 2008;
McClendon, 2003). For the most part, this work has taken essentially
pluralist and rational choice approaches with little attention to critical
perspectives, the role of the state, or power (Pusser, 2008).
More recently, however, a new strand of research in higher educa-
tion has emerged, one that combines critical theoretical approaches with
work on politics and power. This critical-political approach to higher
education turns attention to hegemony, inequality, ideology, and the
roles of the state, civil society, and organized interests in contests over
higher education. It is distinctively different from pluralist, interest
group driven, or rational choice models for understanding postsecond-
ary behaviors. We note, though, that while critical work is an increas-
ingly important arena for research on such issues as postsecondary stu-
dent access and equity (Lee & Cantwell, 2011; Solarzano, 1998; Tier-
ney, 2006), even those works that adopt a critical stance on matters of
access rarely explicitly address power in its various manifestations.

Critical Political Theory and Power in Higher Education

By acknowledging issues related to power, critical scholars of higher
education have been able to bring social theory and models of contest to
bear on challenges that have persistently evaded the efforts of function-
alist researchers (Martinez-Aleman, in press). Critical scholars have ad-
dressed such topics as the commercialization of knowledge production
(de Sousa Santos, 2006), the limitations of market models of university
transformation (Marginson, 1997), academic capitalism (Slaughter &
Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), the ascendance of neoliberal
policy in a variety of national contexts (Levin, 2007; Pusser, Kempner,
 University Rankings in Critical Perspective   547

Marginson, & Ordorika, 2011; Valimaa, 2011), critical approaches to

power in higher education (Marginson, 1997), and the role of the state
in shaping postsecondary mission and practice (Morrow, 2006; Ordorika
& Pusser, 2007; Rhoads & Torres, 2006; Slaughter, 1990). These works
point to the utility of critical political theories in the study of global
higher education.

Universities as Political Institutions

It has been argued that colleges and universities can be conceptual-
ized as political institutions of the state. We follow Carnoy (1984) in de-
fining the state as the set of formal institutions—including governance
mechanisms, the judiciary, regulatory agencies, the military, and other
entities that serve to shape collective activity in the service of individ-
uals’ rights—that taken together establish legitimate sovereignty over
a given area. Political institutions of the state are those organizations
that require state resources, allocate scarce state benefits, and gain their
charter authority from the state, where all of those activities are medi-
ated by political contest and formal decision-making bodies (Ordorika
& Pusser, 2007). Of course, the state also has interests of its own and
serves as a political actor and mediator (Ordorika, 2003; Schumpeter,
1942/1976) as well as representing the interests of the nation on the
global plane. This suggests that both public and private universities
can be considered political institutions of the state (Kaul, 2008; Pusser,
2008)—and, indeed, many national jurisdictions around the world ex-
plicitly position and regulate both public and private institutions as part
of the responsibility of the state. Both types of institutions are factors in
key state projects, albeit often in contradictory ways (Labaree, 1997).
Those contradictions are inevitable, given that the state has long been
understood as a site of contest for hegemony (Gramsci, 1971), where
political and intellectual interests, elements of the civil society, and so-
cial actors vie to shape ideologies and class structures (Althusser, 1977;
Carnoy, 1984; Friere, 2000; Poulantzas, 1978). State goals for higher
education encompass economic and social development and moderniza-
tion and the redress of inequality inherent in such development. States
expand the capacity of higher education systems at the same time that
elite and prestigious institutions limit enrollments to key undergradu-
ate and graduate programs, and colleges and universities play a role in
building the state itself (Ordorika & Pusser, 2007).
As political institutions, universities are driven by power. States con-
centrate power in societies and nations, and state actions constitute a
central manifestation of power in postsecondary education. Universities
548   The Journal of Higher Education

are also directly affected by competition between various economic and

social interests (Pusser, 2004). This includes contestation over student
entry and over the meanings and effects of postsecondary programs.
While universities provide space and shelter for critical groups and
counter-hegemonic agendas, they are also used—more continuously
and effectively—by powerful families, professions, and social groups
to reproduce and legitimize the exercise of political, economic, social
and cultural wealth, authority, and power from generation to generation.
Elite universities provide credentials that are scarce and valuable. They
are a prize that has long driven postsecondary contest. In universities,
there are also conflicting demands on faculty priorities, demands which
are emblematic of competing interests. For example, universities must
apportion the balance of time between research for profit-making com-
panies and research designed to directly fulfill public health goals. The
nexus between state, society, and university is mediated by relations of
power. These relations shape, and in turn are shaped by, global postsec-
ondary rankings.
What drives state agendas? Why do postsecondary institutions con-
form (not easily or automatically but in general and in the last analy-
sis) to those state agendas? Why and how is it that research-intensive
universities, of the type that figure in the rankings, tend to respond to
the social and economic interests of the same powerful corporations and
leading families that exercise a notable ongoing influence in politics,
public debate, and the affairs of state in almost every country? This arti-
cle is focused on one technology of power in higher education—univer-
sity rankings—and will not explore in detail the social logic of power in
and through universities, a topic deserving of an article in its own right.
We will briefly note some of this work. Gramsci (1971) explained
that in dealing with national populations, states work with two kinds
of mechanisms: those based on coercion and those such as educational
institutions that are based on securing consent and the exercise of hege-
mony. On behalf of the state, educational institutions reinforce and re-
produce the leadership of the dominant social groups, including norma-
tive practices and forms of knowledge that secure their interests. Bour-
dieu’s (1988) argument concerning social and cultural capital provides
an empirical framework for mapping manifestations of class power in
the university context. Likewise Althusser’s (2001) notion of “ideo-
logical state apparatuses” pinpoints the role of culture and science in
the reproduction of social and economic power. Slaughter and Rhoades
(2004) analyzed these issues in the context of the contemporary United
States. They traced practical connections between leading univer-
sities and corporate interests and the patterns of state legislation that
 University Rankings in Critical Perspective   549

enable the university’s work for capital. Though not every institution of
postsecondary education is a direct instrument of class power and state
agendas, those institutions with the greatest resources and authority are
most apt to reflect the dominant interests in society, notwithstanding the
presence of critics and dissidents. It is notable that the overall frame-
works of postsecondary education, and the values embodied in those
frameworks, tend to reflect and reproduce the day-to-day practices of
the leading institutions. University rankings are an especially clear em-
bodiment of these frameworks and values. It is also no coincidence that
the institutions that are normalized by rankings, and elevated to the
leading positions, are also the institutions that train most of the persons
who occupy roles at the summit of both states and leading corporations.
In sum, our analysis of global rankings below is based on the premise
that from a critical political perspective, rather than being technical ex-
ercises in assessment, rankings constitute and express relations of politi-
cal power, in which the particular techniques of each ranking system are
the servant of and driven by normative agendas. In fact, some rankings
seem to create or confirm a preordained hierarchy of institutions. The
year 2009 saw the appearance of a Russian ranking of the world’s lead-
ing universities, prepared by the Independent Rating Agency RatER.
This ranking located 15 percent of the top 350 universities in Russia and
placed Moscow State University above Harvard, Stanford, and Cam-
bridge. Other more established rankings seem to favor interests, values,
types of institution, and/or postsecondary practices rather than attempt-
ing to prestructure the details of the ranked hierarchy itself. We begin
the analysis of power and rankings with a closer look at power itself.

Power
Power has long been a contentious subject in social and political the-
ory. Perhaps such contestation, which is itself an act of power that is
practiced by scholars with their own individual locations within rela-
tions of power, becomes an inevitable consequence of an explicit re-
search focus on power. Indeed, there is considerable disagreement on
how to define power (Dahl, 1961; Lukes, 2005; Morgan, 1997). Fol-
lowing Lukes (2005), we draw upon Bertrand Russell’s definition of
power as “the production of intended effects” (1938, p. 19). We find this
definition helpful for its emphasis on intentionality, a particularly use-
ful concept for application to higher education, an arena that has long
relied on normative understandings of such central ideas as goals, in-
terests, and equity. The definition is also helpful because it points to the
relational aspect of power. Organizations, interests, and persons seek to
550   The Journal of Higher Education

secure effects in relation to other materialities. Furthermore, we find

particularly useful Weber’s (1947) notion of power as the ability of an
actor to impose his or her will in spite of resistance as well as the sub-
sequent work based on Weber from Mills (1956) and Parsons (1967).
They suggest that power can be understood through its role in creat-
ing structures that institutionalize processes of authority and that tend
to further privilege elites. This structural approach enables us to create a
distinction between normative beliefs about relations of power in higher
education—such as professional autonomy and the rules, regulations,
and legislation that formally codify power in postsecondary organiza-
tions—and the interests served by particular configurations of power.
The structural approach also creates room for dispersed democratic
forms of power, collective forms, social movements, and acts of resis-
tance (at least some of which might be characterized as acts of power).
Foucault (1977) argued that power was exercised not by denying in-
dividuals agency but by socializing them as actors who voluntarily op-
erate in the best interests of other, more powerful agents—a process he
defined as a “disciplinary practice.” Relations of power did not abol-
ish the freedoms of individuals but controlled and directed those free-
doms in particular ways. At the heart of these models is a question of
the degree to which power is contested and the ways in which individu-
als come to understand their own standpoint reflexively in relation to
power.

Lukes’s Critique
In his “radical critique” of the understanding of power, Steven Lukes
(1986, 2005) presented a model that unfolds in three dimensions. Each
dimension has utility for considering the relationship between power
and global rankings. Lukes suggested the first dimension of power is the
one most often found in classic analyses of power (Dahl, 1961; Weber,
1947). It also informs much of the work on the politics of postsecond-
ary research. This first dimension is dominated by functionalist, rational
choice and pluralist approaches to understanding power. Here contest is
essentially limited to interest group competition, where the majority of
revealed preferences drives decision making.
Lukes’s second dimension draws from Bachrach and Baratz’s (1970)
elaboration of an advanced form of agenda control, which builds from
Schattschneider’s definition of organization as “the mobilization of
bias” (Bachrach & Baratz, 1970, p. 8). It turns attention to the factors
that shape contest beyond the rational choice approach and to the ways
in which normative beliefs are created and the decision-making space
 University Rankings in Critical Perspective   551

narrowed through the exercise of power (Pusser & Marginson, 2012).

The second dimension establishes a very different perspective, moving
from an analysis of decision making to an analysis of how the decision-
making process is controlled (Lukes, 2005).
The third dimension of power in the Lukes typology takes another
conceptual step forward as it contemplates the use of power in tran-
scending the decision-making process itself. In the third dimension,
the constraints imposed by power extend to individual and collective
imagination so that contest itself is rarely, if ever, contemplated. Contest
would call upon individuals to imagine the unimaginable and to think
the unthinkable, particularly where those unimagined potentials chal-
lenge the use of power to preserve dominant formations. Understand-
ing the third dimension calls for the analysis of the nature of ideology
and normative beliefs themselves as a form of the exercise of power, a
standpoint that calls into question myths, sagas, and dominant narratives
in political, economic, and social life. We now apply Lukes’s model and
other critical insights to the topic of rankings.

Rankings in Higher Education

While rankings are not a new phenomenon in higher education (Stu-
art, 1995), they have become increasingly prominent in higher educa-
tion systems around the world over the past three decades, especially
the most recent decade. From initial rankings of overall institutional
prestige to more nuanced analyses of individual departments and pro-
grams at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels, there is
now a ranking system in place to cover nearly every formal system of
postsecondary institutions in the world. Ranking systems in many na-
tional contexts have become so influential that not only do they rank
institutional outputs, but they also shape the character and quantity of
those outputs (Ehrenberg, 2000, 2003; Kirp, 2003). Rankings thus have
become both a representation of the relative prestige and influence of
postsecondary institutions, particularly in the United States and China,
and a key driver of institutional prestige and influence.
Hazelkorn (2008), in a study of institutional leaders in a variety of
countries, found that rankings were understood as essential to institu-
tional reputation and shaped virtually every aspect of institutional orga-
nization and governance. Nearly 90 percent of Hazelkorn’s respondents
had implemented strategies to improve institutional ranking, to monitor
the performance of peer institutions, and to use rankings to set institu-
tional priorities and resource allocation. Whether through their visibil-
ity in the political economy of postsecondary institutions, or because of
552   The Journal of Higher Education

their utility in political economic contests over postsecondary policies,

rankings have been instrumental in reshaping the core mission and func-
tions of a wide array of colleges and universities (Marginson, 2007).

Applying the Model to Global Rankings

Our contention here is that a framework based in theoretical under-
standings of power, particularly in the three dimensions put forward by
Steven Lukes, enables one to better understand the relationship between
states and postsecondary rankings. We focus on three key concepts that
underpin the application of models of power to the study of rankings:
1) intentionality, 2) legitimacy, and 3) ideology (Pusser & Marginson,
2012).
On the first point, we argue that higher education systems and institu-
tions are intentionally organized within states to produce particular out-
comes. That is, states have essential purposes that must be met through
the provision and regulation of higher education, although those pur-
poses will vary depending on the nature of the state and its goals. Given
the importance of assessment and accountability in contemporary post-
secondary education across national contexts, we argue that the mea-
sures in each national ranking system serve as fundamental guides to
essential state purposes and expectations for higher education in a given
context.
With regard to our second point, we argue that, in order to remain
legitimate, states must distribute scarce resources in ways that are seen
to be consistent with national or territorial expectations for fair and effi-
cient allocations. This is very much the case for higher education, where
both the functions of postsecondary institutions, the policies shaping
their organization and governance, and the allocation of places in those
institutions must be consistent with state goals for higher education and
equitable treatment of those who attend and the broader set of beneficia-
ries of the postsecondary project.
Our third conceptual pillar, ideology, begins from the premise that
each state has a distinctive ideological approach to the provision of
higher education and a different set of creation myths, sagas, and beliefs
about national culture that motivate postsecondary policies and assure
legitimacy (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). These ideologies, sagas, and core
beliefs are distinctive to each national context and each state. The con-
text shaping expectations for higher education in contemporary South
Africa, a nation with a fundamental need to increase equality of access
and to build a new state apparatus through the education of a diverse
set of professionals, is quite different from the context underpinning the
 University Rankings in Critical Perspective   553

postsecondary project in the United States, a system in which the high-

est form of academic capitalism is currently practiced and market com-
petition is framed as an end in itself (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004).
Taken together, intentionality, legitimacy, and ideology suggest that
individual states will have distinctive ranking systems appropriate to
measuring their own unique purposes and goals for higher education.
We will now consider the specifics of those measurements.

Data Collection
For the purposes of this article, the authors analyzed a wide range of
rankings systems, both national rankings with global importance, such
as the U.S. News and World Report annual ranking of America’s Best
Colleges, and global rankings, such as those constructed by the Shang-
hai Jiao Tong University Institute of Higher Education. In addition to
those two, arguably the most prominent rankings systems in higher edu-
cation, the authors evaluated the rankings produced by the Center for
Higher Education Development in collaboration with Die Ziet (CHE in
Germany), the ranking system of the Leiden University Centre for Sci-
ence and Technology Studies (CWTS in the Netherlands), the Higher
Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT),
the Times Higher Education (UK), the Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México (UNAM), and webometrics. It should be noted that there
are a large number of national ranking systems, all normative in intent,
some of which use the same or similar techniques to those employed
by the global rankings and U.S. News and World Report, which are dis-
cussed here (Salmi & Saroyan, 2006).
These rankings systems were evaluated for the degree to which their
metrics reflect distinctive national norms and goals and, subsequently,
the degree to which they vary from one another. The rankings systems
were analyzed for the presence of such metrics as academic reputation,
research productivity, institutional resources, student characteristics,
rates of participation and completion, faculty quality, attention to un-
derserved populations, and for the degree to which these metrics shaped
rankings.

What the Rankings Measure

Despite the expectation of unique ranking metrics and contextual
variation, the analysis of rankings suggests there is surprisingly little
variation in what the rankings systems measure. That is, despite quite
different state projects and national contexts, postsecondary rankings
554   The Journal of Higher Education

are remarkably similar. As Table 1 demonstrates, academic reputation,

institutional resources, faculty quality (e.g., as measured by prestige of
terminal degree and compensation or by using proxy measures of qual-
ity such as student-staff ratios as in the Times Higher), and faculty re-
search productivity are measures that figure explicitly or implicitly
across the systems. Reputational surveys are particularly important fac-
tors for U.S. News and the Times Higher. The Shanghai Jiao Tong rank-
ings are focused on faculty publications and reputation, with empha-
sis on citations in high-impact journals and honors, awards, and prizes
garnered by individual faculty. Webometrics, which focuses on the vis-
ibility of universities on the worldwide web, Google Scholar, and other
new media, serves as an explicit indicator of “global presence,” a state
objective underlying all global rankings.
Taken together, the various rankings do not measure distinctiveness
in mission—for example, by trapping individual variation in values or
objectives. Rather, they measure institutional wealth and prestige in
what is imagined as a common game, with research power, publications,
resources, and student characteristics, such as selectivity in U.S. News,
as proxies for wealth and prestige. This has enormous implications for
states as they attempt to build and assess postsecondary projects that
meet essential national commitments in distinctive contexts.
The concentration of ranking metrics on funded research, elite stu-
dents and faculty, and entrepreneurial revenue generation also defines
the fundamental purposes of higher education in all state projects by
its contribution to elite formation and research in the interests of eco-
nomic development, with a particular emphasis on individual and na-
tional wealth accumulation. These purposes are so distant from the lives
and aspirations of the vast majority of individuals in states across the
world that if we were building a system of comparison from the ground
up it would be impossible to imagine such rankings achieving promi-
nence, let alone a monopoly on formal global accountability systems in
higher education. But this they have done. The rankings present a highly
visible example of the “mobilization of bias” over time, where particu-
lar practices and beliefs are persistently promoted by powerful interests
until they become widely accepted norms.
The fact that rankings identify and define a few institutions as ex-
emplary based on reputation, wealth, research productivity, and highly
prepared students (as measured by test scores and class rank) has sig-
nificant implications for institutional prestige and the role of the state
in higher education. Rankings reinforce the process of student stratifi-
cation between colleges and universities and the concentration of re-
sources and prestige in a very few institutions (Astin & Oseguera, 2004;
Table 1
Principal Higher Education Ranking Systems and Their Normalizing Effects
Ranking System/Agent
Responsible for Ranking Primary Indicators
U.S. News and World Academic reputation/college quality
Report ranking of U.S. Faculty reputation/resources
universities Student characteristics/selectivity
Student retention and completion
Institutional resources
Alumni support
Times Higher Education Research reputation
annual ranking of best Research citations per head
universities Graduate student output
Research funding from industry
Teaching reputation
Total staffing resources
Total revenue
Proportion of staff who are international
in origin
Proportion of students who are interna-
tional in origin
Academic Ranking of Nobel Prize winning and Fields Medal
World Universities, winning alumni and academic staff
Shanghai Jiao Tong Uni- Number of high citation researchers
versity Graduate School Publication in leading journals
of Education Intensity of these research outputs across
the whole institution
Normalizing and Political Effects
Elevates institutions:
Seen as competitive in the sense of a higher education market, in which quality and value are equated
with standing in the market
With concentrated research capacity and advanced reputations as historical bearers of state mission
With enhanced wealth, as signified in the indicators for alumni giving, institutional resources, and
faculty productivity
That give priority to students selected on the basis of high scores (who tend to come from socially
advantaged families), rather than selected on the basis of the enhancement of social access (e.g.,
inclusion of students from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education)
Elevates institutions:
With advanced reputations in both teaching and research, as historical bearers of state mission
With exceptional concentrations of research resources in the science-based disciplines, while also
research active across the whole academic staff; this elevates institutions fitting the template of the
United States/United Kingdom research university (favoring English-speaking countries, Western
Europe, parts of East Asia)
With enhanced wealth, as signified in the indicator for institutional income and that for staffing
resources
With high utility for industry, as measured by the indicator for industry income, thereby also fitting
the neoliberal template for entrepreneurial universities
With enhanced global reputation together with high concentrations of foreign students, thereby favor-
ing institutions that market foreign education on a high-volume commercial basis and also fitting
the neoliberal template for entrepreneurial universities
Elevates institutions:
With advanced reputations as historical bearers of state mission
With exceptional concentrations of research resources in the science-based disciplines, while also
research active across the whole academic staff; this elevates institutions fitting the template of the
United States/United Kingdom research university (favoring English-speaking countries, Western
Europe, parts of East Asia)
(continued)
Table 1 (continued)
Principal Higher Education Ranking Systems and Their Normalizing Effects
Ranking System/Agent
Responsible for Ranking Primary Indicators
Higher Education Evalu- Similar in form to the Jiao Tong ranking
ation and Accreditation in that it is focused entirely on research;
Council of Taiwan however, no indicators for award/prizes
A composite of a large number of specific
indicators of research publication and
citation outputs
Separates short-term and medium-term
measures
Leiden University Centre Crown Indicator: Citations for science
for Science and Technol- papers, per head of academic staff,
ogy Studies normalized for field variation in citation
rates
Brute Force Indicator: Total citations for
science papers, normalized for field
variation in citation rates
Webometrics annual Volume of web pages and content pages
ranking of institutional produced
presence on the web Volume of Internet traffic on institutional
sites
Normalizing and Political Effects
Elevates institutions:
With exceptional concentrations of research resources in the science-based disciplines, while also
research active across the whole academic staff; this elevates institutions fitting the template of the
United States/United Kingdom research university (favoring English-speaking countries, Western
Europe, parts of East Asia)
Seen as ‘innovation ready’ using the short-term indicators, thus especially fitted to the needs of
industry
Elevates institutions:
With exceptional concentrations of research resources in the science-based disciplines; this elevates
institutions fitting the template of the United States/United Kingdom research university (favoring
English-speaking countries, Western Europe, parts of East Asia)
Crown indicator rewards quality and comprehensiveness of research capacity and has a particular
importance for academic reputation
Brute force indicator rewards size of research capacity and has a particular importance for industry
and state objective of harnessing institutions to the economic interests of industry
Elevates institutions:
With advanced capacity in information and communications technology (which favors institutions in
wealthier nations)
Proactive in academic publication and communication, thereby influential at global level
Productive of high quality materials of interest throughout the university world, thereby influential at
global level
Proactive in self-marketing, thereby also fitting the neoliberal template for entrepreneurial universi-
ties
Table 1 (continued)
Principal Higher Education Ranking Systems and Their Normalizing Effects
Ranking System/Agent
Responsible for Ranking Primary Indicators Normalizing and Political Effects

Centre for Higher Educa- Survey data collected from institutional
tion Development, in staff and from students, in relation to
association with publisher many service areas and the range of
Die Zeit (customized academic disciplines, across all the
comparisons of teaching institutions included in the comparison
and campus services now Academic staff queried in relation to
extended from origin in research standing, students in relation
Germany to several other to teaching and services; resulting in-
European countries) dicators can then be customized to suit
the inquiry—thus the choice- making
prospective student selects which indi-
cators to use in making comparisons
Rather than an ordered hierarchy of all
institutions, institutions are grouped
into three categories of value for each
specific indicator
Less normalizing than other rankings/comparisons because of the element of customization and the use
of three broad categories of ranked value rather than an institutional ‘league table.’ However, choice
of indicators elevates institutions:
Seen as competitive in the sense of a higher education market, in which quality and value are equated
with standing in the market
With advanced reputations in both teaching and research, as historical bearers of state mission
With exceptional concentrations of research resources in the science-based disciplines, while also
research active across the whole academic staff; this elevates institutions fitting the template of the
United States/United Kingdom research university (favoring English-speaking countries, Western
Europe, parts of East Asia)
With enhanced wealth, as signified in the indicator for institutional income and that for staffing
resources

Estudio Comparativo de Comparative metrics based on faculty ECUM does not rank institutions. Rather, it focuses on the capacity and accomplishments of Mexican
Universidades Mexica- characteristics, scholarly publications universities in meeting the goals of the Mexican state.
nas (ECUM), Dirección and citations, research productivity,
General De Evaluación at contributions to the public good and the
the Universidad Nacional mission of the Mexican state
Autónoma de México
558   The Journal of Higher Education

Marginson, 2007). Rankings also publicly legitimize a highly inequi-

table distribution of such public resources as research funding, subsi-
dies for student attendance, and infrastructure development. We have
argued elsewhere (Marginson, 2007, 2009; Pusser & Marginson, 2012)
that rankings and selectivity are bound together, as are selectivity and
institutional prestige. In a world of increasing polarization between the
modestly endowed many and the affluent few, postsecondary prestige
rankings serve as one more accelerant.
Reputational ranking is also a great source of institutional power,
and institutions transform themselves in pursuit of that power. Highly
ranked colleges and universities attract highly prepared students from
around the world and serve as key platforms for global networks of
influence. At the same time, rankings generate increased competition
within and between institutions and states. The traditionally collabor-
ative arena of knowledge production is pressed to preserve disciplin-
ary and academic norms in the face of the annual and highly visible
accounting of achievement through metrics that parse institutional re-
source generation and prestige at school, department, program, and indi-
vidual faculty levels.
Over time, there is a “rankings effect”: Rankings drive efforts by in-
stitutions and the state to pursue prestige through excellence in com-
petitive rankings. States and institutional managers seek the forms of
behavior and specific outcomes that will maximize rankings perfor-
mance—for example, concentrations of high-quality research activ-
ity, enhanced student selectivity (often in tension with social access),
marketing campaigns designed to artificially boost reputation, and so
on. Here rankings play a “disciplinary” role (Foucault, 1977; Sauder &
Espeland, 2009) in which national systems and individual institutions
are both disciplined by the system of assessment and learn to discipline
themselves by implementing its norms.
Because the norms of ranking systems are mostly consistent with the
world’s strongest higher education institutions located in the United
States, this disciplinary effect is especially invidious in nation-states
outside the United States. Despite the wide global variations in re-
sources, states of development, national histories, traditions, languages,
and cultures, institutions outside the United States are pressed into fol-
lowing the template of the globally dominant universities that lead the
rankings: research-intensive institutions with selective admissions poli-
cies, conducting funded research in many disciplines, with particular
focuses on science and technology and elite professional schools. De-
spite the multiple and at times conflicting state goals embedded in the
 University Rankings in Critical Perspective   559

missions of postsecondary institutions around the world—for example,

the differing inherited missions in relation to nation-building and social
access—certain goals, such as science research outputs, have become
increasingly preeminent. The disciplinary process of global ranking is
both leading a process of global postsecondary strategic convergence
and undermining aspects of traditional national policy agendas (Mar-
ginson, 2007). In that respect, the state project being pursued here is not
simply national but also neo-imperial, being most closely tailored to the
interests of the nations traditionally dominant in the higher education
sector: the Western nations and, above all, the English-speaking nations
led by the United States and United Kingdom.

Contextualizing Contemporary Rankings

This convergence of global rankings around institutional wealth, re-
search productivity, faculty publications, and elite student characteris-
tics is surprising on a number of dimensions. First, despite a longstand-
ing commitment to the production of both public and private goods
through higher education in nearly every state, the most legitimate
postsecondary projects—as measured by rankings criteria—are those
that produce primarily private benefits. This duality, the university’s
paradoxical roles as a site of stratification and of social mobility, has
long shaped its position as both site and instrument of political eco-
nomic contest (Gramsci, 1971; Ordorika, 2003; Slaughter, 1990). Nor is
this duality a significant constraint on the rapid acceleration in prestige
rankings (Ehrenberg, 2003). Thus, there is virtually no attention in any
of the major rankings to such goals as improving the access of students
from traditionally underrepresented groups, increasing the affordability
of high-quality postsecondary education, contributions to community
development, or social justice (Pusser & Marginson, 2012). This points
to the manner in which rankings have become joined to neoliberal state
projects that display a high level of commonality. Neoliberal restructur-
ing is applied in various national circumstances, but everywhere it en-
tails a partial evacuation of social agendas and the elevation of business
values. In that respect all states are partly converging in their values,
norms, and objectives, albeit on terms which sustain the dominant posi-
tion of the neo-liberal states.
This illustrates our central argument about the need to explain post-
secondary education in terms of power. To emphasize the point, given
the inherent diversity of state needs and goals, and the manifold variety
of institutional norms and cultures in higher education, this convergence
560   The Journal of Higher Education

of rankings metrics makes little sense, unless contextualized within

broader structures of power. We have argued that intention matters and
that states consciously choose the patterns of resource allocation and
policies that build higher education systems. In turn, postsecondary in-
stitutions contribute purposefully to some aspects of state building over
others (Ordorika & Pusser, 2007).
This mutually reinforcing process also legitimizes a distinct ideologi-
cal approach to postsecondary education. While the creation sagas of
higher education in the United States are linked to the institutional role
in training leaders for moral and political development in the colonial
colleges and to community progress through agricultural and mechani-
cal sciences in the public land-grant colleges (Rudolph, 1965), inten-
tion, legitimacy, and ideology are closely linked today in the United
States and globally through the project of neoliberal restructuring of the
contemporary university and the contemporary state (Pusser, Kempner,
Marginson, & Ordorika, 2011). The underlying purpose of this restruc-
turing project is wealth accumulation—accumulation for accumulation’s
sake—and too often accumulation for the sake of the few. At the same
time, postsecondary rankings and the associated demands for account-
ability, adaptation, and uncritical conformity are firmly rooted in neolib-
eral philosophy (Rhoads & Torres, 2006) and further evidence the utility
of rankings as mechanisms for setting and legitimizing neoliberal state
agendas.

Limits on the Mobilization of Bias:

Rankings That Use Alternate Norms
Fortunately, the dominance of neoliberal metrics for evaluating post-
secondary organizations is not so totalizing that alternative models can-
not be countenanced. Nor do they need to be entirely theoretical or ab-
stract thought experiments. One particularly powerful example of the
potential for a counter-hegemonic ranking system emerged through a
national study of U.S. medical schools published in 2010 (Mullan,
Chen, Petterson, Kolsky, & Spagnola, 2010). Medical schools, as with
other postsecondary organizations, are traditionally ranked by metrics
that focus on a relatively narrow set of outputs. The authors of the study
noted:

Medical schools are the only institutions in our society that can produce phy-
sicians; yet assessments of medical schools, such as the well-known U.S.
News & World Report ranking system, often value research funding, school
reputation, and student selectivity factors over the actual educational output
 University Rankings in Critical Perspective   561

of each school, particularly regarding the number of graduates who enter pri-
mary care, practice in underserved areas, and are underrepresented minori-
ties. (Mullan, Chen, Petterson, Kolsky, & Spagnola, 2010, p. 805)

At the time of the study, the U.S. Congress had just passed, and Presi-
dent Obama had signed into law, a highly contested health care reform
bill. Among its many policy implications, the bill expanded access to
health care to traditionally underserved populations. The study pre-
sented a ranking of U.S. medical schools based on a composite index
created by the authors, the “Social Mission Score” (SMS). The Social
Mission Score was based on analyses of the percentage of primary care
graduates in each medical school, the percentage of graduates from
areas with health professional shortages (HPSAs), and the percentage
of underrepresented minority graduates from each school (Mullan et al.,
2010).
The three institutions ranked most highly in the Social Mission Score
rankings were Morehouse School of Medicine, Meharry Medical Col-
lege, and Howard University College of Medicine. None of the three
were ranked in the top 90 schools (the complete published ranking) in
U.S. News’ Best Medical Schools – Research category for 2010 (Mer-
edith, 2009). Only the Morehouse School of Medicine (16th) was ranked
in the top 90 schools in U.S. News’ Best Medical Schools – Primary
Care category for 2010 (a ranking that includes as one factor the per-
centage of graduates entering primary-care specialties). Furthermore, no
school ranked in the top 20 of the Best Medical Schools – Research
category also ranked in the top 20 in the Social Mission Score index.
Of those institutions ranked in the top 20 in U.S. News’ Best Medical
Schools – Primary Care category, two (Morehouse School of Medi-
cine and the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine) were
also ranked in the top 20 on the Social Mission Score index (Meredith,
2009). Four institutions were cited in the article for combining high lev-
els of research productivity with exceptional primary care output: the
University of Minnesota, the University of Washington, the University
of California at San Diego, and the University of Colorado. Just as the
ranking of SMS and Best Medical Schools varied, so too did the re-
sponses to the publication of the SMS. In each case, the perception of
the utility of various metrics for ranking medical school activities and
the prioritization of those activities depended on the ways in which vari-
ous commentators understood the potentials and purposes of contempo-
rary medical schools (Fears, 2010; Gold, 2010).
These disparate perspectives again turn attention to the importance
of context, ideology, and normative beliefs for understanding rankings.
562   The Journal of Higher Education

The Social Mission Score index serves as a leading example of the po-
tential for reframing excellence in postsecondary educational rankings
by adapting the criteria used in ranking systems so that they measure
the core mission and goals of the organizations under a particular state
project.
Another example of rankings based on counter-hegemonic norms is
the system of university assessment developed by the Estudio Compara-
tivo de Universidades Mexicanas (ECUM), produced under the auspices
of the Dirección General De Evaluación at the Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México (UNAM), the national university of Mexico. This
assessment has developed metrics for evaluating higher education insti-
tutions in Mexico not simply on the basis of conventional research out-
puts but also in relation to democratic aspects of their public missions,
including the expansion of social opportunities and public purposes of
the Mexican state through postsecondary provision. It is designed, in
part, to address a challenge that was put this way: “Standardized mea-
sures of academic output become an international homogenizing force
that throws universities of diverse origins, traditions and roles, into a
common process of competition in uneven conditions and unequal pos-
sibilities for success” (Ordorika, 2009, p. 74). The Estudio Comparativo
is also unique in that it provides comparative metrics but no actual rank-
ing (Márquez Jiménez, Lozano Espinosa, Ordorika Sacristán, & Rodrí-
guez Gómez, 2009).

Conclusion
The analysis of global ranking systems points to the manner in which
postsecondary rankings simultaneously serve the purposes of states and
leading postsecondary institutions, and hence the purposes of those so-
cial groups and economic interests best able to influence both. In fact,
rankings confer on these dominant political formations in postsecond-
ary education a new degree of coherence even at a global level, where
rankings increasingly regulate the operations of the “competition state”
(Cerny, 2007) in higher education. Notwithstanding the heterogeneity
of postsecondary systems, institutions, norms, and policy objectives
around the world, there is a certain convergence and cross-national nor-
malization in the ranking process. Here it can be argued that rankings
are seen to embody a meta-state project—an imperial project (that is,
a project embodying the interests of the globally strongest states) in
which institutions are being slotted into a preordained global hierarchy.
Rankings are also normalizing institutions everywhere according to
neoliberal strategies that elevate some nationally-based interests (busi-
 University Rankings in Critical Perspective   563

ness, finance systems, wealth accumulation) above others (especially

those traditionally not provided by select models of postsecondary edu-
cation), while again strengthening the global position of the strongest
nations. Furthermore, by normalizing relations of intensive competition
and hierarchy between institutions, rankings foster the worldview em-
bodied in neoliberalism (the social realm as a competitive marketplace),
justify the unequal outcomes of unequal competition, and give comfort
and legitimation to those who benefit most from the growing economic
inequalities that have marked the neoliberal era. In doing so, they rein-
force both new and older forms of power.
This article has focused on the role of rankings as one manifestation
of contemporary state, social, and university power. Further studies
might consider other aspects of the effects of rankings—for example,
the impact of rankings and associated performance technologies in rela-
tions between the faculty and the administration in the contemporary
university, an area noted but not fully explored here. What are the short-
term and long-term implications of rankings for academic freedom and
creativity, and do these effects play out differently between leading uni-
versities (where academic freedom might be seen as one instrument fos-
tering a high rank but on the limited terms of the ranking criteria) and
other institutions?
The application of critical theories of power to an analysis of global
rankings turns attention to the role of prestige and privilege in shaping
state postsecondary goals, strategies, and patterns of resource alloca-
tion. Similarly, future research and scholarship will benefit from critical
political theories that place power at the center of conceptual models
of such postsecondary domains as research policy and activity, postsec-
ondary access, educational financing, governance, patterns of faculty
mobility, and innovations in the curriculum. The use of critical concep-
tual models based in an analysis of power will offer new insight into a
variety of contemporary challenges and lead to a better understanding of
global higher education in the decades to come.

Notes
1 For earlier formulations of this argument, see Marginson (2007) and Pusser and

Marginson (2012).

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