Viewpoints: An Economist's View of University League Tables

Many newspapers and magazines now publish league tables of universities. They do this because it sells extra copies of their publications. All over the world, schoolteachers pin these tables up on notice-boards. Human beings are fascinated by rankings. It is presumably for Darwinian reasons: your many-times great grandfather came high up a pecking order and that is why you are still here. Even in games, like football or table tennis, people have to construct leagues. Economists have a generic view: most of the time if you allow people to be free the world will come out well. How does that do in the case of university league tables? My view is: poorly. This is a case, like pollution from a smoky factory, where private actions cause bad 'externalities' on others. The main issue, here and throughout much of what we have seen in public sector regulation in the last decade, is what might be described as the conflict between informing the consumers and disheartening the employees. Say we take the Financial Times league table of universities. It rates 97 universities on a set of 16 criteria. These are the average A-level scores of the entering students, the ratio of applications to places, the staff-student ratio, research quality as assessed by the government Research Assessment Exercise, teaching quality as measured by the of Quality Assurance Agency, percentage of first class degrees, the employment rate of leaving students, percentage of students entering professional training, percentage of graduates going on to a higher degree, percentages of students going into research degrees and taught masters degrees, percentage of overseas students, per-capita