Academic institutional rankings are beneficial to the entire education system. Take any key stakeholder and the rankings invariably are an important information point of reference. For example, these are increasingly being used by the students as a sole criteria for making their admissions decision.

This is also logical, given the nature of the ranking frameworks covering various considerations such as research and innovation, teaching/ faculty, placements, perception, etc. Academic institutional rankings are critical to the education ecosystem as they support the following:

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Offer a neutral evaluation of performance: Even though the academic institutions offer glimpses of their achievements on their websites and in the media, its rankings are important for the education ecosystem as they provide a neutral evaluation on the performance of the institution.

To enhance objectivity and reliability of such evaluation, rather than relying on the data provided by the institutions themselves, leading ranking systems incorporate several objective criteria sourcing their data from independent reputable data providers.

Few such frameworks are National Institutional Ranking Framework by MHRD – Government of India, Academic Ranking of World Universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong, CWTS Leiden Rankings and Reuters Top 100 Innovative Universities. They source the research and innovation parameters data from the Web of Science and Derwent innovation databases provided by Clarivate Analytics.

Attract top faculty and student talent: Institutional rankings are a popular tools used for short listing the academic institutions by the prospective students, research scholars as well as faculty while making a decision on which institute would they like to be a part of. Talent pool prefers to be aligned to the top ranking institutions and therefore ranking does impact the education system.

Avail better funding: Policy makers and funders invariably like to see a better return on the investments that they are making in raising the quality of education in the country. Therefore it is not surprising that for a given quantum of funding, ranking often emerges as one of the criteria on funding allocation decisions. As an example, during the National Institute Ranking Framework 2017 rankings release, ministry of human resource development department announced better funding to the institutions faring well on the NIRF rankings.

Identify research collaboration partners: There are a variety of factors taken into consideration, when it comes to selecting research collaboration partners — rankings is one such factor supporting the decision. The faculty and researchers often find it convenient to tap into their existing network to forge collaboration ties.

Other factors impacting the decision are similar areas of interest and strengths, easy access to collaborate owing to geographic proximities etc. However, there has also been a strong preference to have ties with other top ranking institutions for raising the quality of research as well as profile of one’s own institution.

Foster research and innovation: Research and innovation metrics typically have a strong representation on majority of the institutional ranking frameworks. Such representation ensures that the academic institutions recognise the need to continuously raise the quantum and quality of their research and innovation output. Rankings thus help fuel research and vice- versa.

Some might argue that research influences institutional rankings more than it should. However, if you take into consideration how research and innovation are strongly connected to each of the following key considerations for an educational institution, the emphasis placed on the research for rankings seems logical and reasonable.

Funding from the government: Government of India has been actively promoting the research parks to enhance collaborative research and development between the industry and the academia. Several new research parks will be further funded at IITs and IISC to support Start-up India initiative.

Industry-academia collaboration: Research and innovation are the foundation of majority of the collaboration ties between the industry and the academia.

Sponsored research and consultancy projects offered to the academia helps with the funding. IIT Madras and IIT Bombay have seen investments of Rs 370 crore+ into sponsored research and consultancy projects in the financial year 2014-15 as per the NIRF data.

Monetisation / commercialisation: Monetisation of the research and innovation based outcomes can provide a strong source of revenue to any academic institution. A case in point is the New York University. Almost 60 per cent of NYU patents have been licensed to companies for development and commercialisation.

Academic institutional rankings are critical to the entire education system. Their importance is already evident to various stakeholders but its awareness and utilisation will only grow further with time.

The writer is head professional services, Clarivate Analytics.