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Defining excellence in higher education
It is now high time for Indonesia to implement strategic collaboration among all its universities on SDGs at a national level.
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It is now high time for Indonesia to implement strategic collaboration among all its universities on SDGs at a national level. (Shutterstock/File)
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ountries have agreed on and committed themselves to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This initiative requires significant transformations of societies and obviously institutions of higher learning have fundamental roles in these transformations. It also requires a new way of defining excellence in higher education, namely serving the needs and aspirations of society.
Up until now, universities have been assessed and ranked mainly based on their research output. Those universities that are lucky enough to have the resources to develop state-of-the-art teaching and research and development (R and D) infrastructure, and that can pay top salaries to attract and retain the world’s top scientists, will inevitably do well in the traditional university rankings. However, many other universities are quietly getting on with diverse activities that also make the world a better place in less celebrated ways which make steady, incremental yet vital contributions to climate science, to renewable sources of clean energy, tackling diseases, and fighting against poverty, etc. Such works are often less recognized in the current university ranking systems.
However, the world’s first university impact rankings announced on April 3 by the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, reveals a new hierarchy of global institutions of higher learning based on their work toward the SDGs. This is the world’s first global attempt to document evidence of universities’ impact on society, rather than just R and D and teaching performance.
It seeks to offer an alternative view of university excellence, giving greater prestige to applied research that tackles social and economic problems rather than just awarding academics for high citations in their research. The metrics also include universities’ policies on academic freedom, their use of secure employment contracts and their share of senior female academic staff.
According to THE, the rankings offer “an alternative view of university excellence” and “develop an unprecedented picture of the extraordinary impact that universities have across a huge range of activities”. This first edition included 462 universities from 76 countries. The rankings assessed universities on metrics that were based on 11 of the 17 UN SDGs.
Any university that provided data on the 17th SDG i.e. revitalizing global partnerships (the only mandatory goal) and at least three other SDGs were included in the overall ranking. THE also published the results of each individual SDG in 11 separate tables, and rewarded any university that had participated with a ranking position, even if they were not eligible to be in the overall table. The data for the rankings were normalized for university size where appropriate, and THE used other measures to ensure equity between different countries and universities.
In this first impact ranking, New Zealand’s University of Auckland took the first place and Canada’s McMaster University claimed second position. The rest of the top 10 included Canada’s University of British Columbia, the United Kingdom’s University of Manchester and King’s College London, Sweden’s University of Gothenburg and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Canada’s University of Montreal, Italy’s University of Bologna and the University of Hong Kong. However, when countries are ranked based on their institutions’ average overall scores, Canada comes top followed by the Republic of Ireland and Australia. Japan is the most-represented nation in the table with 41 institutions, followed by the United States with 31 and Russia with 30.
