A great many academic and news articles have pointed out the many shortcomings of global rankings. However, universities continue to be complicit with this industry by: (1) providing them with data, (2) drawing on the rankings in their marketing, (3) determining internal resource allocation along the lines of which activities are rewarded by the rankings rather than which serve their students and their context, and (4) by gaming the system to improve their placing.

Given how widespread and easily accessible the criticisms of rankings are, we need to understand why it is that the university sector fails to act on such critiques. This requires us to acknowledge the fact that events in the social world, such as rankings, rarely come into being as a result of a singular cause. We do not live in a laboratory where variables are controlled, and cause–effect relationships can be identified and measured. Rather, there are always myriad mechanisms at play with the causal potential to enable or constrain the emergence of social events. In other words, the wider conditions created by larger mechanisms have effects on the likelihood of an event emerging or not (Danermark et al. 2019).

Conditions that enable a social event such as rankings to emerge and to be sustained despite repeated concerns raised about them need to be in place. And simultaneously, conditions that might constrain such emergence need to be absent or side-lined. It is my argument that central to the emergence of rankings are both the enabling conditions of neoliberalism and the lack of constraining conditions of framing higher education as a common good. To understand the argument that neoliberalism has been key to how rankings have come to grip the imagination of the sector and to impact on so many of its activities, we need to first understand what neoliberalism is.

Many (such as Aalbers 2013; Venugopal 2015) have argued that the term neoliberalism is problematic because it is used in so many ways: to denote an economic system, an ideology, a way of structuring society, and more. It is often used interchangeably with concepts such as hyper-capitalism, consumer culture, free market, and trickle-down economics; but while these often emerge in neoliberal conditions, they are not a full explanation of what neoliberalism is.

Though neoliberalism was first mooted as an economic policy some decades before, it was only through the work of academics such as Friedman, Stigler, von Mises, and Hayek, in the second half of the 20th century, that the ideas really gained traction. And when Reagan and Thatcher began their free market experiment in the 1980s, the underpinning ideology took hold at a global scale. Since then, it has morphed from economic policy pertaining to the privatisation of social structures, the axing of much state regulation, the reduction of taxation on the wealthy, and cuts in spending on social support programmes, to become an ideology that extends to all aspects of human behaviour and to our relationship with the environment.

I have argued elsewhere that neoliberalism can be understood as the financialisation of everything we do, say, think, and produce such that ‘value’ becomes allocated explicitly through monetisation (Boughey & McKenna 2021; McKenna 2021, 2022a, 2022b). Here I want to extend that conversation a bit more in relation to higher education. Sayer (2015) suggests that neoliberalism can be understood as a set of three characteristic beliefs: (1) markets are the best form of organisation; (2) power and status should be allocated along lines of wealth, even though wealthy people do little to contribute to a wider social good; and (3) that people are best conceived of as consumers rather than as part of an interdependent society. I briefly reflect on how each of these characteristics manifest in the neoliberal academy.

Neoliberalism thus functions not only as an economic frame but also as a way of understanding the social and environmental world. It is premised on the idea of individual gain and competition and on the idea that success pertains to financial wealth rather than social connection. Neoliberalism, conceptualised as the above three characteristics, is evident at a global scale, and higher education is not immune to its pernicious effects. Indeed, Peters (2019) argues that higher education is no longer an instrument of social policy so much as an integral part of the larger knowledge capitalism.

Despite the pervasive nature of neoliberalism as an ideology, with specific economic, political, and social aspects, it cannot be seen to simply ‘cause’ rankings in the higher education sector. To suggest that neoliberalism ‘causes’ rankings would be as guilty of flattening complex social phenomena (Danermark et al. 2002; Luckett 2007; Luckett & Luckett 2009) as I will shortly argue is at the heart of methods used by the ranking industry itself. Rather, taking a realist view, rankings can be seen to have emerged within the enabling conditions of neoliberalism. The emergence of rankings required a great many pieces of the puzzle to be in place – from a structural and cultural milieu that values individualism and competition and positions higher education as a marketplace, through to the work of key agents, such as the CEOs of the rankings companies and the vice-chancellors and provosts of universities who have embraced the rankings for personal and institutional gain, without much by way of reflection or critique. All of these come together to enable the emergence and uptake of rankings.

Importantly, the emergence of rankings also required the absence or minimising of constraining conditions, such as an ideology of the university as a common good, or the belief that knowledge (both its creation and dissemination) should serve the environment and all of society (Ashwin 2020; Connell 2022).

Wilbers and Brankovic (2023:746) argue that the ‘casual attribution’ of rankings to ‘unspecific phenomena such as neoliberalism’ is short sighted. I would temper this claim on two points. Firstly, the realist concept of emergence is useful in coming to understand that neoliberal conditions enabled rather than caused the uptake of the major rankings industry, and that various other conditions also needed to be in effect for this to happen.

Secondly, Wilbers and Brankovic’s argument that rankings are not ‘caused’ by neoliberalism is on the basis that rankings cannot be explained by increased managerialism, thereby seeming to conflate neoliberalism with increasing top-down management. But as Hammarfelt, De Rijcke and Wouters (2017:392) explain, rankings emerge from more than the increasingly top-down management as the ‘practice of ranking ties in with deeply engrained cultural repertoires around competition and performance’. Indeed, neoliberalism is pervasive in a great many actions by actors who are not involved in management at all. Sadly, all who work and study in universities are complicit in the ways in which the academy has become neoliberal and legitimates neoliberal norms and values.

Understanding how neoliberalism has a grip on the academic project is central to understanding the resilience of rankings in the face of critique.

Alongside the big three ranking systems produced by Quacquarelli Symonds, Times Higher Education, and Shanghai Ranking Consultancy (Academic Ranking of World Universities [ARWU]) are more than 40 other ranking systems and sub-systems. These companies enjoy massive profits with most of their income deriving not from the rankings as such but from their re-selling of the data that universities provide them for free (Fonn 2024), often selling data back to the same universities that provided it, but also to governments and corporations. Rankings are arguably mainly a vehicle by which to collect and then sell data (Usher 2022; Usher & Savino 2006). The many criticisms about rankings broadly relate to two issues – their problematic methodologies and their decontextualised nature, which serves a neo-colonial agenda.

Rankings are incredibly pervasive and influential. Unfortunately, most of the many academics researching and critiquing the problems embedded in them do so in specialist journal articles unlikely to be read by the general public. And rankings make good news stories, and so they continue to capture the minds of a great many stakeholders. Unfortunately, they also have an impact on what happens within universities. For example, Rhein and Nanni (2023) argue that many Asian universities, including in Thailand where their research is based, have shifted away from a concern with teaching quality to a concern with research output. As they say, these behaviours are ‘predictable and rational adaptations to the game being imposed upon them’ (Rhein & Nanni 2023:55). Adam (2024:56) shows that rankings are very influential in Canada as they are ‘integral to … universities’ strategic positioning, legitimacy managing, and revenue-generating efforts’. Ishikawa (2009) shows how the rise of rankings in Japan created an image of global elite universities in the country at odds with many cherished academic traditions.

Koenings, Di Meo and Uebelmesser (2020) argue from Germany that rankings have an influence on institutional choice with a particularly strong influence on international students. Shahjahan et al. (2017) show how Denmark and India have directly incorporated rankings in national policies. Taiwan’s Five Year – Five Billion programme is aimed at improving national showings on rankings, and China and Russia have both targeted rankings recommending various shifts in higher education practices to this end, for example, incentivising publication in English. Countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands have even used the graduating university’s ranking to allocate points to potential immigrants.

Baltaru et al. (2022) demonstrate that elite universities are unaffected financially by small shifts in rankings, but that all other universities enjoy or suffer financial consequences, and they argue that this is a social justice issue. As they indicate, ‘Market competition appears to have reinforced hierarchies rather than alleviating them’ (Baltaru et al. 2022:2331). When UK universities’ ranks worsen, they have been found to receive a small but statistically significant reduction in both number of applications and average school leaving score of applicants (Broecke 2015). In some cases, the academic ‘arms race’ of rankings has even damaged institutions to the point of bankruptcy (Kehm 2014:107). But change is afoot.

Universities such as Colombia University (US), Utrecht University (the Netherlands), Zurich University (Switzerland), and Rhodes University (South Africa) and several universities in India have now opted out (Holmes 2024b). Individual schools have also withdrawn from discipline-specific ranking systems such as the 17 US medical schools and law schools (including Yale and Harvard), with the dean of Yale Law School, Heather Gerkin stating that, ‘We have reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession’ (Harris 2022).

When the Universiti Sains Malaysia withdrew, their vice-chancellor, Tan Sri Dzuklifi Abdul Raza, stated:

And he went on to argue that local universities might end up playing a catch-up game in their attempts to improve their position in the rankings, and:

Unfortunately, the rankings industry continues to include universities that refuse to participate by relying on incomplete publicly available data and they refuse to indicate to the public that their rankings are based on partial data sets. No university can avoid some impact of rankings, even those that have taken the ethical stand not to participate (Kehm 2014).

There are thus overwhelming reasons why rankings are unscientific and therefore extremely problematic to be taken up in institutions tasked with creating and disseminating knowledge. Furthermore, the overview offered here focused on the methodologies of these rankings and did not engage with the many other concerns universities should have, including, for example, the problematic business model used by the industry and the extent to which some universities have gamed the system through buying researcher affiliations, falsifying data, and interpreting some of the criteria rather loosely in their data reporting (Ansede 2023; Calderon 2020; Corricello & Myles 2021; Kutner 2014; SIRIS Academic 2023).

The puzzle as to how rankings have taken hold in the way they have needs to be understood within the wider neoliberal turn in our universities as outlined at the start. As explained, part of the neoliberal turn involves the metrification of human endeavours whereby what is valued is that which can be counted towards status and power. ‘In a neoliberal system, the emphasis shifts to the aspects of the university that can be “counted”, for example, profit, efficiency, and rankings’ (Knoetze 2024:1678). Thus, it is unsurprising that the rise of the rankings happened as part of a wider trend in the Social Sciences towards using metrics to describe and understand complex social phenomena. This meant that there was a ‘growing interest among scholars in measuring things like output productivity or prestige’ (Wilbers & Brankovic 2023). As Hammarfelt et al. (2017:392) explain, Social Science research increasingly legitimated numbers as data sets in place of attempts to capture and analyse messy human realities. They go further to indicate the importance of the sociopolitical context of psychology at the time in which statistics were being called upon largely through the eugenics movement to counter ‘a perceived decline in great men’. Over time, this concern for the elite individual characterised by a particular breeding and upbringing spread to a concern for the university that demonstrated excellent, elite scientific values. As Peters (2019) argues, rankings are part of larger moves towards performativity and the dominance of technoscience. He suggests that the result is a collective anxiety that does damage to both individual institutions and to the sector as a whole.

Academics who take the potential for the university to be a common good in service of people and the planet seriously, need to collectively reject rankings. It is only through collective action that these perverse systems can be toppled. This has become more possible as the number of high-profile institutions rejecting the rankings increases.

A larger issue is the extent to which neoliberal conditions enable universities to act in the ways that they do, including and going beyond systems such as rankings. These include the metrification of the student experience; the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in knowledge creation, dissemination, and learning; the commodification of publications; the surveillance of students; and more.

Collectively calling out institutions that participate in unscientific rankings is thus part of a larger project. There are a great many battles to be fought in imagining the university as a common good. After all, ‘[r]eproducing privileged elites is not a legitimate use of social resources’ (Connell 2022:171). Bringing about change will require all who work and study in the academy to reflect on their understanding of the purposes of higher education for society and the environment at large and then to bring those purposes to bear in decision making about how we spend our time and our resources.

In demonstrating some of the many critiques of the ranking industry, I have argued that we need to reflect on how it is that such a problematic process has captured the higher education sector. In an era where there is so little trust in science, why do universities actively participate in something so patently unscientific? To answer this question, we need to look at the wider conditions in which rankings emerged.

Rankings would not have emerged in the ways that they have and taken hold, despite repeated critiques from researchers, if it were not for the extent to which we have commodified knowledge, positioned students as customers, and positioned universities as businesses competing against each other.

As Rhein and Nanni (2023:63) argue, rankings are ‘an expensive game that cannot be won’. But as the ‘age of deference to global rankings’ (Holmes 2024a) comes to an end, we need to focus on what conditions would be better than neoliberalism. And for that we must answer a new question: what would conditions be like if the higher education sector committed itself to being a common good and directed its resources to that end?