An Impossible Dream? The Efficacy of Using Rankings to Improve the Perception of a Non-OECD Country's Educational System.

Rankings have an increasing impact on higher education. Regardless of their true ability to judge a university's success or failure, rankings are used by students, their families, and, increasingly, policy makers to define the quality of institutions. Rankings have gone beyond comparisons among universities within individual countries: Today, they compare universities across geographic regions, and a few rank universities in a global context. This paper reviews the impact of rankings on uni- versities and explores the methodology behind some of the more popular global ranking systems. It then discusses the impact these rankings could have on perceptions of the educa- tion systems of countries not included in the Organi- zation for Economic Coop- eration and Development (OECD) (the assumption being that OECD countries tend to have the longest history of utilizing rankings and of marketing their education systems internally and externally) and explores whether these rankings equally influence the perceptions of OECD and nonOECD educational systems as well as the feasibility of improving the rankings of institutions from non-OECD countries. As a case study, this paper focuses on Chile and discusses the relative value and influence of global rankings in regard to the country's higher education system. THE IMPORTANCE OF RANKINGS TO INSTITUTIONAL IMAGE To the general public and to many policy makers, rankings (or league tables, as they are referred to in the United Kingdom) are synonymous with quality. They are a short-hand method used to assess whether one university is better than another (Sarraf et al. 2005). However, what rankings actually measure is often of a secondary nature to information consumers. Although some semblance of rankings existed in the United States prior to the 20th century, university rankings in a mass fashion began in 1983 with the publication of rankings of U.S. universities in U.S. News & World Report. Since that time, country- or region-specific rankings have been developed in the United Kingdom (The Times, The Guardian), Canada (Maclean's), Asia (Asiaweek), Europe (The Times), China (netbig, Guangdong Institute of Management Science, Research Centre for China Science Evaluation of Wuhan University, The Chinese Universities Alumni Association, the Shanghai Institute of Educational Science), Japan (Asabi Shimbun, Diamond, Kawai-juku, Recruit Ltd.), Germany (che /Stern), Poland (Perspektywy), and Australia (Melbourne Institute, Good Guides) (Liu and Liu 2005; Van Dyke 2005; Yonezawa, Nakatsui and Kobayashi 2002). In addition to rankings developed by magazine publishers, some governments have developed methodologies by which to compare institutions (e.g., Russia, China, and Kazakhstan). The value and impact of rankings vary by constituency and country. Despite dispute over the validity of their methodology (Bowden 2000; Eccles 2002; Sarraf et al. 2005; Turner 2005; Van Dyke 2005), rankings remain popular, and the number of rankings available to the public grows. Though many rankings are constructed with the intention of influencing student choice, their actual influence on students is unclear at best. Their impact on student choice in the United States appears to be minimal (Kinzie et al. 2004), and in the United Kingdom (Eccles 2002) and in Canada, their impact is either puzzling (in the case of larger institutions) or localized to smaller, primarily undergraduate universities (Drewes and Michael 2006). Though it would be inappropriate to extrapolate these findings to all rankings in all contexts, a developing body of evidence indicates that rankings do not have a significant influence on college choice. Nevertheless, rankings in the United States do have an impact on university administrators (Hossler 2001a, 2001b; Kinzie et al. 2004). In the quest to improve the reputations of their institutions, administrators pursue policies intended to improve their institutions' ranking. …

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