Every couple of months we have the traditional ritual of yet another national newspaper releasing a highly complicated league table telling us which university is better than another. Just last week we were told how York is now apparently the ninth best university in the country according to The Times.
Now I’m not normally someone who would disagree with such a highly esteemed newspaper, but I find it absurd that our universities can somehow be ranked according to some arbitrary criteria created by a group of almost inevitably Oxbridge-educated journalists sat in a tower block in the middle of London.
It seems to me bizarre that there can be one form of ‘perfect’ university. There are so many assorted reasons why people come to university in the first place it seems to undermine the results of a purely academic ranking system. We all hope to achieve something different from our time at university to other people. Some of us are here simply because we want the best academic learning environment, others specifically want to gain extra qualifications to enhance their employment prospects. Yet more students are obviously here to enjoy the social life and the nonacademic opportunities on offer, and consider university to be a place to make new friends, to try new activities, or to leave home and to gain a new sense of independence. The fact that there are so many varied reasons why people decide to come to university in the first place means that it is simply wrong to create just one set of criteria by which it can be judged. This simply perpetuates a naïve view that everybody comes to university simply because they have an intrinsic desire to immerse themselves in academia. Just speaking from a personal point of view I can assure you that that is certainly not the case.
So any university league table is essentially pointless as it can never truly define what the ‘best’ university is as such a definition is completely subjective and changes from person to person as we are all looking to get different things out of our university experience. League tables such as those produced by The Times simply judge a university on its academic standards when in reality university is not just about developing academically, but also about developing as a person.
Although we should always be trying to encourage universities to achieve the best results that they can and to continue to improve, university league tables promote an elitist approach to this process of improvement. The question has to be asked: how can a journalist who has in all probability never visited the vast majority of these universities decide which one is better than another? The quality of a university is defined by the people who make it up, not by the quality of the buildings or drop out rate.
As with all league tables, university rankings treat all students as the same and assume that we all have the same aims when we start university; failing to treat us as individuals. As students we get out of university life what we put into it. If we fail to get involved in university life and enjoy ourselves or fail to work hard academically then we will inevitably have a relatively poor university experience. Any university can give us a good experience, just as any of the same universities can give us a bad experience. The result will be derived from how we live our student years. We are all different people and all want to achieve different goals during our university lives. Thus different universities will be best for different people dependent on what they want to achieve. To say that one specific university is ‘best’ takes a one-dimensional and simplistic approach to the issue.