Beyond the rankings: Benchmarking for real university success
Oct 21, 2024It’s ranking season again, and universities are once more fixated on their positions in global league tables. These rankings, such as those from Times Higher Education and QS World University Rankings, often shape decisions for students and funders alike. While an institution’s rise in the rankings can be celebrated as a success, a drop can lead to public scrutiny and internal stress.
The problem is that these rankings vastly oversimplify universities’ complexity, reducing them to a single score. This ignores their multifaceted role and, worse still, can drive short-term, reactive behaviours that divert focus from long-term sustainability, student learning, and academic development. How can universities turn this obsession with rankings into something more useful?
Benchmarking offers a more strategic alternative. Instead of being an end in itself, it is about using comparative data to inform institutional improvement. It shifts the focus from competing in a global race to learning from others, comparing management practices, and working towards mission-aligned goals.
The seduction and flaws of rankings
The issues with rankings are well-known. They are skewed towards research output, citation counts, and reputation surveys, which favour large, research-intensive institutions. This neglects teaching-focused or regional universities that serve as economic and social anchors in their communities.
When universities adjust their priorities to match ranking metrics, they can lose sight of their mission. The rush to publish more papers stretches academic workloads and diminishes teaching quality. Unless coupled with commensurate funding of student housing and support services, focusing on recruiting excessive numbers of international students to boost “global outlook” metrics can lead to neglecting both local and international students once on campus, along with other domestic priorities.
Institutions that excel in promoting social mobility or serve specific industries—such as healthcare or agriculture—often go unrecognised. Moreover, rankings can skew management practices. The incentive structures they create push universities toward actions that favour league tables rather than the institution’s broader mission.
Benchmarking: A more useful approach
Benchmarking involves identifying appropriate peer institutions and comparing performance across metrics that align with the university’s mission and objectives. Rather than competing for a place on the global leaderboard, the aim is to learn from others and adopt practices that improve long-term institutional health.
Finding real peers
A crucial first step in benchmarking is identifying your real peers. Global rankings compare universities that have little in common. For example, comparing a regional university in Australia to Oxford makes no sense.
A research-intensive university should benchmark itself against similar institutions with comparable academic profiles, student demographics and missions. Similarly, teaching-focused or regional universities can learn more by comparing themselves with institutions that excel in teaching, community engagement, and regional impact.
Selecting metrics that matter
One of the greatest strengths of benchmarking is its ability to focus on metrics that reflect the institution’s mission. Unlike rankings, which force universities to chase broad indicators, benchmarking allows for a focus on what is truly important.
For research-focused universities, it might be about improving grant success rates or attracting top researchers. For teaching-centred institutions, relevant metrics might include student satisfaction, graduation rates, and post-graduation employment outcomes. These are critical to many universities’ missions but are often undervalued by the major rankings.
Benchmarking allows universities to select the metrics that matter most to them and compare their performance against peer institutions that excel in those areas. By learning from others, universities can adopt best practices in areas like curriculum design, student support, or employability initiatives.
Improving management practices
Benchmarking is not just about data comparison; it’s about driving better management practices. For a university struggling with student retention, benchmarking against peers with higher retention rates can reveal practices that improve student engagement and well-being.
In research management, universities that struggle to attract competitive funding can benchmark themselves against more successful institutions. These institutions might invest more in early-career researcher development or internal workshops on grant writing. Universities can identify these gaps through benchmarking and make concrete changes to internal processes or structures.
Focusing on long-term planning
Another key benefit of benchmarking is its capacity to support long-term planning. Universities are complex institutions that take time to change direction, but rankings push them towards short-term gains. This can mean prioritising international recruitment or increasing research output without considering long-term sustainability.
Benchmarking, on the other hand, encourages institutions to align their strategies with long-term goals. For example, a university that seeks to improve its social impact could benchmark itself against peers excelling in community-based research or industry partnerships. This approach can help build a long-term strategy that delivers genuine impact rather than chasing short-term metrics for rankings.
Fostering continuous improvement
Benchmarking is not a one-off exercise; it should foster a culture of continuous improvement. Universities can develop adaptive strategies that evolve over time by regularly comparing performance across key areas and learning from global peers. For instance, a university might excel in attracting students but struggle with graduation rates. Over time, benchmarking can help identify and implement changes to student support systems or academic advising.
The role of policymakers
Policymakers also have a role to play in encouraging benchmarking over rankings. In Australia, where many universities participate in global rankings, governments could help shift focus towards benchmarking exercises that consider the diversity of institutional missions. For instance, the Higher Education Standards Framework could form the basis for a more nuanced national benchmarking exercise that better reflects the varied missions of Australian universities.
Conclusion: Rankings as a tool, not the goal
Rankings will remain part of the higher education landscape, but they should be treated as just one tool in a broader toolkit for institutional development. The key is to move from a culture of competition to one of learning and improvement. By adopting a benchmarking approach, universities can use rankings data to inform strategic decisions, improve management practices, and ensure long-term sustainability—ensuring they remain true to their mission and well-positioned to thrive in an evolving higher education landscape.