How rankings such as NIRF do more harm than good

Institutional rankings in higher education, such as the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) whose 2026 edition is expected to be released soon, are bad for institutions because it ignores the core criteria regarding education: it does not assess teaching and the holistic development of students. As a result, it presents a misleading picture to students.(Sign up for THEdge, The Hindu’s weekly education newsletter.)Does this mean that there should be no evaluation of institutions? The answer is yes; there should be evaluation, but converting it into a single number has problems. First, the criteria for evaluation are many, and they cannot be put as a rank on a single point scale. A single number gives an incomplete or wrong picture.Secondly, a deeper problem is that all the important criteria are not easily measurable. As a result, some important ones, though crucial, are totally absent from the ranking frameworks. Some other important criteria can only be measured partially. Unfortunately, such attempts to measure partially often leave out the central parts of those criteria.Join THEdge LinkedIn groupThirdly, the rankings have an insidious effect on institutions. They change an institution's internal functioning because they distort which activities are emphasised. Institutions are then forced to conform to the framework, either because of government grants or to attract students, or both. Let us look at it in more detail.An institution has three major dimensions of activities. These are (1) teaching, (2) research, and (3) mentoring. Teaching here means subject-specific classroom instruction, including laboratory courses. Research is meant to be both basic and applied work leading to discovery and innovation. Mentoring means holistic development of students through activities and personalised work with the faculty.Holistic development includes the development of character, compassion, communication skills, leadership qualities, etc. The atmosphere or culture in the institution leaves a deep mark on its students.An institution creates an impact on society through its alumni and through its research and innovation outcomes. It also ought to provide an example of good democratic governance, where dialogue with opposing viewpoints does not affect the harmonious, cooperative environment among people, as it does today. However, there is no way to measure this aspect too.To return to the rankings, it is a stark fact that the dimension of teaching is undervalued, and the dimension of mentoring is totally absent from the rankings. And these are the two dimensions that directly affect the students the most. NIRF has the first criterion called ‘Teaching, Learning and Resources’, which uses teacher-student ratio, faculty holding PhDs, etc. This hardly says anything related to the quality of teaching, particularly at the undergraduate level. And this contributes 30% of the weightage for engineering and medical rankings (and 40% for college rankings). The second parameter is research, with a weightage of 30% (15% for colleges); the third parameter is ‘Graduation Outcomes’ with a weightage of 20%, based on the pass percentage in examinations, median salary, etc. Two additional parameters, inclusivity and subjective perception, carry a weightage of 10% each.What is the difficulty in including teaching in rankings? The problem is: how do you judge the best-ranked teaching institute when the methodology is not clear? Should the evaluators sit in the classes of different institutions and compare? This is clearly not feasible. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to collect quantitative feedback from students for each course in an institution. And the qualitative feedback can provide direct, pointed input to the teachers. Thus, this method works well when the goal is to identify the lacunas and improve teaching in an institution; however, it does not tell which institution has the best teaching, or even compare teaching across institutions.Given the above difficulties, what do you do? You start including indirect factors such as teacher-student ratio, infrastructure, etc. However, all these miss the actual quality of teaching.Now, we come to the dimension of mentoring students. This relates to civic life, dialogue, teamwork, and building individual resilience, persistence, sensitivity, empathy, etc. The development of these qualities is important for the student to lead a fulfilling life that also makes an impact. Surely, these qualities are not easy to measure, and they are not included in the rankings.So, we have rankings of educational institutions in which education (namely, teaching and mentoring) is undervalued or missing altogether.The only dimension that gets considered seriously in rankings is research. Here, some third-party parameters are available, such as publications in journals. But there are many journals that vary in quality. So you need to grade the journals and consider only the high-quality ones. But wait, even after grading the journals, how do you give a research rank to an institution? Ideally, it should be based on the impact its research makes on society or on human knowledge. The ranking framework simply counts the number of papers.It is not perfect, and it is the best that can be done under the circumstances. But here starts a severe distortion within the institutions. Faculty start working on incremental research problems because each increment can be published as a separate paper, thus adding to the count and their promotion. Ph.D. students get affected as well. The result is that very little work gets done on substantial problems.In the current framework, consider the plight of colleges that were known for good teaching. Suddenly, their ratings fall because they are not doing research. Their best teachers are hit hard. They are asked what they have been doing all these years without any research. Their promotions get blocked. People get embittered when their hard work receives such rebuke. It affects their teaching adversely; the outcomes of forced research are “ordinary”, if not third-rate. The rankings have indirectly labelled many such sincere teaching colleges as “good for nothing places”.In the case of mentoring students, institutional faculty tend to ignore it, even shun it. It is a task no one wants to do. It is neither counted for rankings nor for individual promotions, and this is when there is a rise of students facing mental health problems and student suicides. We have created a highly competitive system in the first place – for admission, during studies, and on graduation with placement. Lack of supportive teachers and an unwillingness to take the mentoring task seriously, partly due to rankings, might turn out to be the biggest single factor, further accentuating the mental health problems and suicides.The question might arise: who needs rankings? Students seeking admission need them. But the question is: what is a student looking for? If it is good teaching, it is not measured by the current rankings. If it is research, the data indicates that very few students take up research career in industry or academia.There are better ways to bring out different strengths of an institution. A single number for an institution does not give the information required by the student. If it is to find out the starting salaries of graduates (a reality today in the minds of parents for admission), there are already surveys giving this information. The entire system need not be distorted because of it.If the purpose of rankings is to generate pressure on institutions across the world by the forces of globalisation, it needs to be rejected. After all, different societies have different needs, and the institutions need to address their society’s needs and concerns. An Indian engineering institution is located in a land of labour; industries should focus their energies on innovation in these, and not on what research is fashionable in the West.A university that is located in a backward society must uplift it by passing on the message of equality and democracy through its teachings, as well as the way it runs itself. Thus, the institution must address the needs of its society in its context. This would be more important than merely coming up with numbers in a centralised ranking framework. Evaluation of institutions is required, but not through rankings. There are ways of showing the strengths of institutions in different dimensions through suitable evaluation. The system needs to realise that decentralisation with autonomy, given high goals, is a much better way to improve institutions and their outcomes in their given contexts. See reference below for more details.Increasingly, the world is being driven by the floating of “balloons” of false hope, which leave the majority of students high and dry. Institutional rankings are a part of such a balloon.(Prof. Rajeev Sangal is the first regular Director of IIT(BHU) Varanasi and IIIT Hyderabad, and a former professor at IIT Kanpur. He is the architect of Mission Bhashini, the language translation mission of the Government of India. He designed and implemented the Universal Human Values course as a regular part of academic curricula in engineering education. Views are personal)(Reference: Transforming Academic Institutions: My experiments with a human touch, Rajeev Sangal, Banyan Tree, 2023. https://www.banyantreebookstore.com/product-page/transforming-academic-institutions)