An Obsession with Ranking Is Harming India’s Universities
Swaminathan S | 04 October 2024 | The Hindu
In this digital age, we reduce everything to numbers. This trend has consumed the education ecosystem, as seen in the rise of global ranking agencies, which assign ranks to universities across the world every year. India has its own National Institutional Ranking Framework to rank universities in the country.
The purpose of a university is to teach and mentor future citizens; and to acquire and create knowledge through research. Research and teaching are two sides of the education coin: knowledge creation and dissemination. A university needs to excel in both in order to fulfil its obligations to students and society. Through its activities, a university also has social and economic impacts. It is impossible to capture a university’s multidimensional nature with a single metric, represented by a global or national rank. Yet, this is what ranking systems claim to do….