Every year, global university rankings generate considerable excitement in Bangladesh. BUET, DU, NSU -- who ranked where? We spend days discussing whether a university has moved up or down, entered a particular global list, or fallen further behind internationally recognized institutions. Then, of course, come the social-media fights.
There is nothing wrong with paying attention to global rankings. But we rarely ask a more fundamental question: What exactly are these rankings designed to measure, and are those measures aligned with what Bangladesh currently needs from its universities?
The global university ranking industry is relatively young. The Shanghai Ranking was first published in 2003, initially as an effort to assess how Chinese universities compared with leading research universities worldwide.
QS and Times Higher Education (THE) jointly launched a global ranking in 2004 before separating in 2009. These rankings emerged as higher education was becoming increasingly global.
Their methodologies reflect that environment. In THE's World University Rankings, 59% of the overall score comes directly from research environment and research quality.
Even its “teaching” category includes measures such as the ratio of doctoral to undergraduate students and doctorates awarded per academic staff member.
QS uses a different methodology and places more weight on employability, but half of its current score falls under what it calls “research and discovery,” based on academic reputation and citations per faculty.
There is nothing unreasonable about these measures. They make sense for universities competing globally for research funding, scholars, doctoral students, and scientific prestige. Rankings are also useful to internationally mobile students choosing among universities and countries they may know relatively little about.
Bangladesh, however, is not competing in this market on the same scale.
Our universities primarily educate Bangladeshi students; large numbers of international students are not coming to Bangladesh for higher education.
Internationalization can certainly be an aspiration. But if the immediate task for most of our universities is to provide high-quality education to Bangladeshi students and prepare them for our labour market, should global research visibility be such an important benchmark of their success?
Bangladesh needs high-quality research. We need institutions capable of producing serious scholarship, training PhD students, and contributing to scientific and technological development.
But that does not mean every university should try to imitate a large research-intensive Western university.
There is also a labour-market question. How many research-trained graduates does Bangladesh currently need, and where will they work?
Expanding research-oriented graduate education without a corresponding expansion in research institutions, R&D-intensive industries, and other employers capable of using those skills will not, by itself, create a research economy.
The United States, for example, has major research universities but also liberal arts colleges, regional universities, community colleges, and institutions primarily focused on undergraduate teaching.
They are not all expected to perform the same function. Bangladesh should similarly ask what it most urgently needs from higher education.
I would argue that improving the quality of the four-year undergraduate degree should be one of our highest priorities.
And there is plenty to improve.
Students should have greater freedom to choose and change majors. Credits should be transferable across departments and eventually across universities.
Engineering students should be able to study economics, writing, history, or philosophy; economics students should be able to acquire meaningful training in mathematics, computing, or environmental science.
A university education should combine specialization with broader intellectual development.
We also need to examine faculty recruitment. The practice of hiring very recent graduates as lecturers, sometimes directly from the same departments in which they studied, and putting them immediately onto long-term academic career tracks deserves scrutiny.
Universities need transparent hiring, meaningful evaluation, professional development, and clearer distinctions between teaching and research expectations.
University quality is also about institutional culture. Sexual harassment, bullying, intimidation, and abuse of authority are not peripheral issues.
An institution that performs well on publication metrics while failing to provide students with a safe and professional environment cannot reasonably be called an excellent university.
Nor should we ignore what happens after graduation. Experiential learning, internships, hands-on training, writing and communication skills, quantitative and digital skills, and exposure to workplaces should matter.
If most graduates will enter professional employment rather than academic research, how well a university prepares them for that transition should be part of how we evaluate it.
Interestingly, Bangladesh already has an informal ranking system. An 18-year-old applying to university knows that particular institutions and departments are more competitive than others.
Families and employers make similar distinctions. What we lack is a transparent and systematic way of measuring quality.
Perhaps we should build one.
A Bangladesh-specific framework could evaluate institutions according to their missions. Undergraduate-focused universities could be assessed on teaching quality, faculty qualifications, curriculum, facilities, student support, experiential learning, graduate outcomes, and institutional environment, with research as one component rather than the dominant one.
Program-level rankings could be even more useful. A university may have an excellent economics program but a weak science department, or a strong business school but inadequate laboratory sciences.
A single number for an entire university hides information that students actually need.
None of this means Bangladesh should ignore international rankings. Universities aspiring to compete internationally as research institutions should absolutely pay attention to them.
But global rankings should not determine our entire understanding of what makes a good university.
Aparna Howlader is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Chatham University, Pittsburgh, USA.