Balancing Teaching, Research and Institutional Rankings

Ranking individuals and teams in sport is a fad that has caught on in a big way – the media, and indeed, the public, enjoy the idea of identifying a particular team or individual as the ‘best’ in a given field. In academia, similar ranking of universities and institutions has become a new measure of how centres of learning are perceived. While such rankings are useful in themselves, in that they do give an opportunity for institutions to introspect and identify areas where they excel or lag behind in comparison to their peer groups, they acquire more importance as these rankings are increasingly used as a benchmark for the amount of funding that an institution or university receives, particularly from the state. In addition, rankings may also play a crucial role in shaping the decisions of college aspirants while choosing particular institutions and fields of specialization.