I know they’re bad for me. But I cannot resist them.
I want to argue about the Best Album of the 1980s. Or the Best Literary Character of the 20th Century. Or even the Best Taco in London.
It’s a problem I admit, and one I know many of you share, given the proliferation of ‘Best of …’ lists out there. This type of thing has become a clickbait staple for websites ranging from BuzzFeed to the New York Times. They know it’s reader gold to rank.
Yes, the online world didn’t originate ‘The List,’ but it made them far more pervasive and invasive. Once just the domain of annual ‘Best of …’ magazine issues, spoon-fed lists populate seemingly every click through cyberspace: Most Read Stories. Most Popular Links. Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought.
We’re led around by the nose at every turn. We’ve removed the need to browse, heck, we’ve nearly removed the need to think about what to eat, buy or read thanks to these shortcuts of others’ design, presented by a marketer pushing a certain brand or, more than likely, generated by a complex algorithm tailing us across the Internet.
And it’s working. A recent survey found approximately 35 per cent of Amazon.com’s sales were attributed to cross-sales; that means more than 1-in-3 purchases were sold to a customer who came to the site seeking something else.
Yes, we are suckers for lists.
Perhaps that’s why universities get worked up over their own ‘Bets of …’ lists.
Earlier this week, the QS World University rankings were released. Western found itself ranked No. 199 in the 2013-14 rankings of the Top 200 universities in the world. That number was down from No. 173 in 2012-13 and No. 157 in 2011-12. This year, Western was tied with National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and tucked between Tel Aviv University in Israel (No. 196) and the University of Calgary (No. 201).
Certainly, nobody at Western was breaking out the foam fingers over this one.
But I again ask: Does it really matter? I’ll stop short of saying these lists don’t. We have good people on this campus who are paid to worry about this type of thing. But I hope we don’t get too high or too low as a result of what we read in these numbers.
This is the sort of thing university presidents and fundraisers get asked (or harassed) about when meeting the public. And I know it can be hard when you’re too close to it. But keep this latest list, like all lists, in context.
Is it a reflection of our entire institution? Certainly not. Lists are only as good as the rules governing them. Hence the wild fluctuation on these ‘Best of …’ lists outside of the Top 10 or so schools. Western does well on some, poorly on others.
Don’t forget these rankings are done by for-profit organizations, which means they have a vested interest in making the outcomes as interesting as possible. QS has a strong bias toward British institutions, as well as a growing interest in Asian ones. Notice, how the former remains strong and the latter made gains in the current numbers.
Give QS credit for knowing its customers.
There’s always been some controversy around the QS rankings. Keep in mind, QS offers services – from consulting to recruiting – to the same universities and colleges it ranks. Critics have raised eyebrows at that fact from the start.
But no matter the ranker – and the rancor around said rankers – this horse-race mentality has no place in postsecondary education. I saw it ruin political reporting; debates over ‘Who is up/down?’ or ‘Who won/lost?’ obscured the objective in-depth reporting of news.
Now, that mentality is seeping into postsecondary education.
We know the world-class work going on at Western. Every single one of you can name at least five colleagues performing miracles daily. Boiling down a university, a complex, interconnected system of academics, researchers, students and staff, to a single number is a fool’s pursuit, one rife with pitfalls and bad logic. They define the ranker and its priorities far more than the universities they attempt to rank.
But it makes for something to debate. And that’s the point.