University Ranking Games in East Asia: Triggers and Consequences

Abstract

In recent decades, universities in East Asia have made efforts to integrate into scientific and academic global communities. These efforts have mainly been driven by national governments that increasingly perceive universities’ significant role in national innovation systems. Policymakers in East Asia have focused on building higher education capacity and enhancing national scientific prowess, with a global outlook guided by benchmarks of successful cases, primarily of North American origin. This developmental focus has placed world university rankings in the spotlight for both governments and universities in East Asia. However, as global university rankings rely on the law of parsimony, they can be problematic. Based on many unidimensional indicators, world university rankings give a simplistic, straightforward understanding of a university’s function and value, and such rankings encourage quick comparisons of the positioning of a country and/or university within a list of peers. The problems with this are apparent: Complexities, contextualization, and sustained development are dismissed in favor of the symbolic power of statistics. In East Asian higher education systems, this has led to the increased gamification of the rankings, including the introduction of perverse incentives focused on short-term gains that fail to provide the appropriate foundation to promote sustainable knowledge capacity. It has also led to ranking fetishism, where incentives and activities are set for the sake of moving up the rankings rather than to meet the needs of science, social, and economic priorities and to address the welfare of communities internal (i.e., academics) and external to universities (i.e., society at large, other organizations).