Recruiters Beware of Rankings of Educational Institutions

With a steep rise in the number of educational institutions, recruiters face a problem in choosing institutions for their campus recruitment programmes. Even otherwise they need to decide how much premium to place on name of the institutions from where a candidate obtained his educational qualifications. One of the ways they may try to solve this problem is to look at the rankings of various agencies. This may be an efficient but a very ineffective solution unless the recruiters apprise themselves of how the rankings are arrived at.

First and foremost recruiters need to understand the parameters of ranking. They need to know how data is obtained on these parameters, how much weightage each parameter has. Like Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) mean nothing if they do not measure what is supposed to be measured, rankings mean nothing if they do not reflect real quality of education. Even when the KPIs measure what they are supposed to measure but the data is manipulated then KPIs can be misleading. So is the case with rating and ranking of educational institutions.

Many rankings place high weightage on research output. The metrics that capture research output include number of research papers, standing of journals where researches are published, patents obtained, etc. As a result many institutions have turned into research paper producing factories. Going by the volume of research, we should have been a country with a number of Nobel laureates at least of recent origin.

Popular routes adopted for increasing research output in educational institutions includes increasing number of PhD students left & right, without worrying about research quality. PhD students are also milked by some research supervisors to get publications in their own name. Besides, businesses have sprung up which provide 'professional assistance' of course for a fees to write and get research papers published and even to write PhD theses. This is an open secret in educational circle. Now Artificial Intelligence has become another tool to write research papers without doing real research. Journals have sprung up from no where which get papers published at a fees.

Its not as if government agencies have not responded to these malpractices. They indeed blacklisted quite a few journals. But fraudsters outpace the educational quality inspectors by quite a margin. In order to ensure that quality of publications is not compromised in pursuit of quantity, some rankings give weightage to citations. However, prestigious journals like Nature pointed out that fraudsters have cracked this challenge too. Now they have discovered ways of artificially increasing citations. A deeper analysis of patents will also reveal several issues such as what are shown as patents are actually some other types of registrations which are not at all difficult to obtain, filing of irrelevant patents, outsourcing the work which will result into patenting and like.

Concerned by these academic malpractices some academicians launched an initiative called India Research Watchdog. With reliable evidence they have pointed out several fraudulent research practices. But it is doubtful if recruiters are aware of all this.

Even when research or patenting is not fraudulent, it often causes collateral damage. Under pressure from their management, many teachers are forced to give secondary treatment to teaching which directly affects quality of inputs that students get. Under pressure of these rankings & accreditations, educational institutions are forced to abandon the very values that they are supposed to promote such as free & fair inquiry, ethics and cooperation. In fact in many educational institutions teachers have become competitors because their managements have adopted unscientific methods of performance appraisals. Insecurity on this count leads to nepotism where many teachers right up to the senior positions create a network of 'you scratch my back, I scratch yours'. Instead of working to improve the real quality & performance, they work backwards with performance appraisal as the starting point. Work is assigned to the people in their coterie where they can gain 'visibility' and of course ratings can then be easily mustered on KPIs.

Principles of performance appraisal used in business organisations can not be transplanted to educational institutions. In any case, organisations being complex social systems, practice of management is highly contextual. But since most of the promoters of private educational institutions in India are businessmen or politicians, they tend to apply half-baked lessons from business domain that too mindlessly. In the first place, not many promoters of private educational institutions are known for their professional competence in running their primary businesses or being visionary politicos.

Besides, reliability & validity of the data on which rankings are based, there are issues at the end of rating agencies themselves. Not all agencies, including some very big names in media are beyond reproach. For an idea, scan the newspapers and magazines when they carry their rankings. It is not uncommon to find advertisements of some such private institutions which have been ranked in respective media. One can connect the dots.

Ratings and accreditations of institutions and appraisal of teachers, irrespective of the domain like medicine, engineering, liberal arts, humanities, management, social sciences etc are predominantly managerial issues rather than purely educational issues. And also let us not confuse businesses with discipline of management. Businesses have no special competence which automatically enable them to deal effectively with these complex issues. Hence, it makes lot of sense to pay heed to the advice of Peter Drucker and Henry Mintzberg, the two most respected management thinkers. While Drucker did highlight need for measurements, he had warned that knowledge work is very different from other type of work. He had very clearly stated that traditional methods of putting pressure on knowledge workers is detrimental to their quality of work as well as productivity. It needs no reminder that teachers are knowledge workers. Mintzberg has been highly critical of the belief that what can not be measured, can not be managed. He goes on to argue that real task of leadership is to manage what can not and should not be measured. Those who can not do that are poor leaders themselves.

Biggest casualty of this mindless appraisal, rating & ranking systems is the quality of education. And this matters because, it is the education which makes or mars a country's fate, no matter what rhetoric one uses. But what else can one expect when the very purpose for which a system is designed is to artificially jack up the ratings instead of building quality from inside. Anyone with reasonable understanding of education will agree that it takes decades, if not centuries to build quality institutions. If that be so, how can an institution be granted official status of eminence just on the basis of intent?

The recruiters need to take all these rankings with not just a pinch but I will say a bag full of salt. Ratings may be used at the best to create an initial pool of prospect institutions. What the recruiters can use from their arsenal of business management is the technique of mystery audit. Get inside the institutions. Take a first hand feel of students, talk to the teaching & non teaching staff, talk to the alumni of institutions. This will give you better insights than rankings. Since quite a few institutions are likely to be found wanting in the mystery audits, its advisable to have a large prospect pool than what otherwise one would actually shortlist. Another alternative is to simply go for open recruitments instead of going to specific campuses. Some companies have started this practice. The open pool can provide wider access to talent pool especially people with hunger, which matters more than bland academic performances. With use of AI one can create tests for shortlisting of what otherwise might appear to be an unmanageably large pool of applicants. Most important advantage of open pool will be short-circuiting the corrupt practices which afflict campus recruitment processes in quite a few companies and institutions. Many educational institutions have become glorified placement agencies and many of their directors and heads have been forced to spend more time on PR and marketing. They have been forced to become administrative heads than academic stalwarts whom society looks up to.

Is it asking for too much. Think again. Recruitments are all about people and it is people who make or mar an organisation. Right recruitment is like prevention rather than trying to cure something which has already been afflicted or mould something which is un-mouldable.