In recent days, discussions centred around enhancing global rankings of tertiary academic institutions in Bangladesh are on the upsurge, and dissatisfaction over lower-than-expected rankings are usually followed by some form of analysis either criticizing our educational system or claiming the ranking methodology to be erroneous.
Selected private universities have adopted superficial strategies to pull up their global rankings, outpacing similar efforts undertaken by public institutions. Being recognized as institutions offering world class education integrated with environments promoting high impact research and development (R&D) that results in commensurate rankings is an honourable goal, and efforts must be made to achieve it.
This requires a paradigm shift in our tertiary education modality, and substantial overhaul in our research and development enterprise, especially in institutions offering post-graduate degrees.
However, it is not clear how this effort made to achieve improved rankings correlates with social/economic/technological needs of Bangladesh and assists in nation building.
Webometrics, at present, ranks all the public and private universities in Bangladesh, emphasizing the impact of institutional websites and, to a lesser degree, on the impact of research and teaching.
The University Grants Commission also ranks all universities, however, the metrics and criteria used for such a ranking are unclear.
There are quite a few globally accepted rankings, namely, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE-WUR), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), and U S News and World Report (USNWR) rankings of universities worldwide.
- THE-WUR identifies five indicators, with research, teaching and citations each allocated 30% or overall, 90% of the total score. Research assessing reputation and research income, and citations reflecting the impact of ongoing research precludes universities in Bangladesh from being highly ranked. In the teaching category, scores attributed to number of doctoral students and doctorate degrees awarded, as compared to undergraduate enrollment, puts all academic institutions in Bangladesh at a disadvantage.
- QS ranking assigns 80% of their score to (a) Academic Peer Review (APR) (40%), (b) Faculty/Student Ratio (20%) and (c) Citations per Faculty (C/F) (20%). The remaining 20% is allocated to employer review (10%) followed by a measure of diversity in terms of the presence of international staff and students.
- ARWU intended to assess the global standing of Chinese universities uses six indicators, including number of recipients of Nobel prizes and Field medals, number of highly-cited research, number of papers published in Nature and Science, number of articles in Science Citation Index, being the top four.
- USNWR global university rankings are based upon 13 indicators with 75% of the score assigned to (a) Global and Regional Research Reputations; (b) Publications; (c) Normalized Citation Impact and Total Citations; (d) Number of Publications that are among the 10% most cited publications and (e) Percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited.
The current ranking platforms heavily weigh research outcomes and their impact, that closely follow R&D priorities of developed nations. Historically, research and technology advancements in developed nations have always been to address their national challenges.
Prior to World War II, academic research in the US was mostly privately funded with some government funding for agriculture. World War II prompted all sides to develop technologies to get an upper hand. This led the US to develop the radar and the famous Manhattan Project.
These efforts, mostly led by academics, created symbiotic relationships between the federal government and academia that generated knowledge and developed state-of-the-art technologies, either for warfare or human good. To streamline such funding opportunities, the National Science Foundation (NSF) was created in 1950, with its annual funding jumping from $40 million to $134m in 1959 to respond to the launch of Sputnik.
To maintain technological superiority, developed nations have identified artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing, bio/nano engineering, to name a few, as their top R&D priorities, as evident from government funding preferences, industry foci, and university research portfolios.
Scientific and technological advancements in these targeted areas get preference in publication in premier technical journals such as Nature and Science, resulting in citations and consequently improving the h-index of researchers -- an important metric in ranking.
It is not likely that these research priorities will address the national needs of Bangladesh and more importantly, it might not result in the expected high impact outcomes, due to lack of infrastructures and inadequate funding.
A better approach could be to leapfrog and target opportunities likely to become technology priorities in 10 years that would provide Bangladesh with the opportunity to be a major player in the global leader knowledge economy -- our mantra will be -- we will be locally productive but globally aware.
Universities should be more concerned as to how the educational system and graduates contribute to the social, technological, and economical development of Bangladesh. Such an effort is already underway at Bangladesh Agriculture University in partnership with their research partners. Bangladesh needs to explore the successful practices formulated by developed nations, adopt a whole-of-country approach and tailor a strategy suitable for the country.
This requires identification of priorities funded by private-public endeavours, research pursued by universities and technology commercialized by industry, necessitating
(a) Establishment of partnerships between industry and universities, and international and local universities; and
(b) Instituting multi-user/agency research infrastructures, to address the national as well as global R&D needs, jointly defined by the government, industry, and academia.
Note, all developed nations have similar research priorities, and institutions responsible for developing technologies related to these preferences produce knowledge and the dissemination of which, when led by universities, quite frequently result in higher academic rankings.
In that sense, developing nations are at a disadvantage, and pursuing a strategy that will allow universities in these nations to be ranked is a challenge with fleeting success and does not assist in nation building.
For developing nations, it is rather important to follow the principles and trajectory of events that led to the state of R&D in developed nations, chart a pathway to identify national needs, and leapfrog to technologies that will be globally important in the not-too-distant future.
Mehdi Anwar is Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States.