‘Education not a sport’

Not just a number: Looking at rankings in isolation, it’s easy to form a skewed view of the role and contribution of universities. – 123rf.com

RECENTLY, Times Higher Education (THE) released its World University Rankings for 2023 and as expected, many universities around the world responded with a flurry of self-congratulatory messages highlighting how their institutions either had been top ranked in one thing or another, or had improved upon previous rankings, patting themselves on the back in the process.

There’s little doubt that rankings make for attention-grabbing media headlines. In Malaysia, the press proudly proclaimed that “a record number of 22 Malaysian universities are now in the THE World University Rankings 2023 compared with 18 last year”.