Ranking of Universities in China is Unreliable

There are a variety of university ranking lists published in China, which students and their parents use to choose the schools they will attend. However, most of the ranking institutes are run as a business, and so their credibility is questionable. It is an open secret that the higher ranked universities have paid higher fees to obtain the ranking.

According to a report in Shanghai's Wenhui Daily, an insider at a prestigious university in Shanghai revealed that the university has been visited several times in recent years by one of the people in charge of a well-known university ranking institute. He said that he wanted to help the university do consultations, and he would charge for the service. The university refused him, and as a result, its ranking dropped to second place.

Another example from the newspaper report was of a university professor being asked to talk with his supervisor because he had gently commented to the media that one well-known university ranking in China was not reliable. Owing to enormous pressure from university ranking organizations, the supervisor told the professor, “It will influence our university’s reputation if you don’t speak with caution.”

An education expert, who did not want to reveal his name, said that almost all the university ranking institutes in China are for-profit businesses and are not independent.

These businesses, labelled institutions, do not pay attention to the principles and ideals of the universities. Many of the assessors do not have the credentials necessary to rank academic institutes. Some rankings are based on the number of students attending the university. The more students and teachers a university has, the higher it is ranked.

Some rank according to the amount of research funding, but ignore the quality of the academic papers that result from the research.

Some of the  indicators used to rank the universities in China are: the number of students, the size of the campus, the number of theses published, and the number of departments. Consequently, if the California Institute of Technology (CIT) in the U.S., which has cultivated more than 20 Nobel winners, was ranked using these criteria, it would not rank with the top three universities in China because the CIT has a smaller student body than many of the universities in China.

One department head of a well known university in Shanghai indicated that there are many kinds of universities in the world. Each has its own character and advantages, which are not based on the number of students. A small university can be the best in the world.

Ranking universities according to non-academic indicators is unscientific, and will not be recognized by the international academic world.

For example, Shanghai Fudan University has been ranked from third to twentieth by different ranking “institutes.”

Although there are at least 20 ranking institutes in China, when academic institutes outside of China analyzed the ranking lists of major universities globally, only the ranking of the Institute for Higher Education in Shanghai Jiaotong University was recognized as acceptable.