Even as NUS bowed out of the Times London Higher Education Supplement top 20 ranking last year after falling from rank 19 to 33, it seems that it might not have been too heavy a blow after all.

This revelation comes after the usefulness of the university rankings system was questioned during one session of the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations Academic Conference held from Aug. 21 to 24.

Tu Weiming, a professor from Harvard University, explained that the current system of university rankings was flawed and posed a problem for the development of universities in Asia.

Referring to the inconsistencies in the system of university rankings, Tu said, “Let’s say you rank number one. In some fields you are number one, in some you are probably 100.”

In such instances, the ranking methodology employed has a tendency to skew a university’s performance as some criteria are judged with greater emphasis than others.

The effect is that a university’s ranking will not fully reflect its performances in all other areas.

It could also result in some universities tailoring their efforts to those specific areas that might improve overall standings.

Tu also said the current system is “biased” towards engineering schools and “too focused on the quantifiable.”

“Quantitatively, schools with an engineering focus will rank high. Schools that focus on humanities will rank low,” Tu said.

A narrow selective focus will channel resources to specific fields while neglecting others. This hampers the overall development of universities if resources cannot be equally distributed.

Ton Nu Thi Ninh, a former Vietnam National Assembly member and founder of the Tri Viet University Project said such a system is “not helpful” to the development of higher education in Vietnam.

“The basis (of ranking universities) is in question,” she said

“Rankings should focus on how you go about it, rather than on the end performance.”

However, the limitations and usefulness of rankings are to be recognised and expected.

Ibrahim Ahmad Bajunid, director for the UNESCO-Regional Centre for Educational Planning in the United Arab Emirates, said, “No ranking system is perfect.”

“Any evaluation system will have problems. You can criticise and improve on it, no problem.”

Ibrahim considered the rankings compiled by Times London Higher Education Supplement and Shanghai Jiao Tong University as useful only because they adequately reflected the performance of top universities, such as Harvard University.

Any form of competition between universities in the world will most likely favour the established names.

Ibrahim said, “You must understand that rankings are good if you decide to go to the Olympics. The smaller universities, the community colleges, don’t have to compete with the Stanfords and the Harvards.”

He made a distinction between established universities and lesser-known ones that are part of the “democratisation of higher education” aimed at providing “education to the masses.”

“These rankings systems are suitable for those universities in the community of great universities,” Ibrahim said.

“They are not for those that just provide assess (to education) and opportunity for the masses.”

Focusing too hard on establishing the reputation of individual universities might come at the expense of developing overall higher education within a country.

Ninh said her country’s “obsession” with ensuring that a local university got into the global rankings was “unhelpful for Vietnam.”

“People at large, the economy, the nation, are impacted by universities. At the end of the day, their opinions are ignored by the measurement system,” Ninh said.

One way to approach this issue is to raise the standards of higher education in a country instead of focusing on rankings.

And universities should pay more attention in nurturing students and their potential.

Ibrahim said the issue of how well a university does is “really not about the universities, but the students.”

“It does not really matter what the university is, it’s what you are,” he said. “Even the people at Harvard say that Harvard is great because of its students.”

The panel session was conducted on the second day of the academic conference, which also discussed socio-economic and geo-political issues affecting the Asia-Pacific region.