I am an undergraduate student from an Indian Engineering college, and I hate it. My college has the worst campus life, with irritating + arrogant faculty members. Still, according to Outlook, it's the 28th-best engineering college in India (2019 survey).
It inspired me to research how these organizations (including NIRF) rank these colleges. What goes under the hood? It would help new students decide which college they want to join (hopefully). 🤞🤞
404 Happiness 😔
To start with, let's take NIRF Ranking parameters. Here's what it looks like:
(Source).
Did you notice something?? There's no mention of Learning, Happiness, Confidence, Friendships, or other aspects of a student's 4-year experience.
I'll change this quote to "All you need is knowledge. False. All you need is CGPA, Attendance, and Stress". I guess this is what Indian Colleges think :(
I looked further into the documents. They mainly focus on teacher-student ratios, the number of teachers with Ph.D., acceptance rate, no. of successful graduates, Average placements, Median salary, etc. If you see the table, they give only 10% weightage for peer perception. Even though these parameters logically sound great, they are easy to manipulate.
WDYM easy to manipulate?
Okay, so there are many ways. To start with, why do you think college administrations can't fudge up these numbers, like test scores, acceptance rate, graduation rate, etc? Do you want examples?
- Columbia University's admission of fudging data for ranking throws up questions
- Pharma council to book institutes for fudging info
- Iona College review finds that former provost misreported SAT scores, graduation rates, and other data to governments and raters alike.
It's a long list. Just Google "colleges fudging their data to improve their ranking"
Let's say the college is not cheating. The data they are providing is correct. Even then, colleges can use less egregious ways to improve their rank. Instead of cheating, they can work to improve each of the metrics that go into their score. For example, One of the metrics in the document is the teacher-student ratio. Administrations can easily recruit teachers with lower experience for less salaries. What I am trying to say is that a model of proxies is far simpler for people to game.
I'll take another metric, the graduation rate. It's easy to raise graduation rates, for example, by lowering the standards. Many students struggle with Computer Networks and Computer Architecture prerequisites. Just Water down those requirements and more students will graduate.
I found this quote by UK Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli
A University should be a place of light, liberty, and of learning.
I don't this stands for Indian colleges or at least mine.
So, is there a fix? 🧑🏭
I think, instead of Ranking, colleges should release all of their Data on their website. This way, students can ask questions about the things that matter to them. I don't think changing the ways these organizations rank colleges would change anything. The model can always be manipulated if it is based on statistics and data.