the invention of the university market
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In 2023, the Shanghai ranking will be 20 years old. To dive back into its beginnings is to reconnect with an era, abundant, when the idea of openness to the world suddenly supplanted the prejudices inherited from the Cold War. The globalization of economic exchanges had its academic side, still barely perceptible when the Jiao-tong University of Shanghai published, in the summer of 2003, its first international ranking of higher education establishments.
The list, commissioned by the Chinese government, then had a specific objective: to determine the characteristics of a major international university in order to accelerate the modernization of Chinese universities according to the scientific standards of North American universities of the Ivy League, Harvard in head. Since 2009, the ranking team has become an independent consulting firm, Shanghai Ranking, whose offices are very close to Jiao-tong University.
What was supposed to make it possible to measure the gap between Chinese and American establishments has given rise to a real world market for universities. Every summer, countries scrutinize the performance of their leaders in research – the predominant criterion in this ranking, based on the number of scientific publications, Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals. “In the same way that we could classify companies, it has become normal to classify universities, in competition with each other to attract the best students, the best teachers and researchers, the best economic and financial partners”summarizes Jean-François Cervel, who in 2003 was the deputy director of the cabinet of the Minister for Research, Claudie Haigneré.
In 2004, to give the reply, the British consultant Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) joined forces with the magazine Times Higher Educationa supplement to Times. They will then separate, each to establish their own international ranking: QS World University Rankings and Times Higher Education (THE). “THE also develops a commercial activity, providing its services to help universities to properly inform the rankings, at the risk of a conflict of interest”, explains Jean-Yves Mérindol, former university president (Strasbourg then Sorbonne Paris Cité), who is working on writing a history of French higher education. For its part, QS offers services in “data strategy” to attract the best profiles and funding.
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