Smashing the glasshouse. Diminishing the prestige of measures of higher education

Abstract

According to many authors the ranking of institutes and universities of higher education (HE) has provoked dramatic consequences in terms of transforming these institutions into a global market, sending the university prices skyrocketing and generally modifying the landscape of HE. While these measures, developed worldwide by several actors, abound in terms of measures of excellence, and in subjective indicators of prestige, none of them include as one of the criteria the price to the students of attending their courses and campuses. Substantial doubts have also been raised about the methodologies adopted by developers. If costs were included the panorama of HE in terms of desirability for students and their family would change considerably. In the present work we test this idea with a sample of universities for which data are available. We also poll the existing literature to gauge what the scholars thinks of HE rankings in terms of risks versus desirability. Finally, we use these elements to build a case against rankings of HEIs, including various strands of scholarship, including from sociology of quantification.