Opinion | How Singapore’s obsession with university rankings only serves to hurt it
- Higher education institutions like to place undue emphasis on journal-friendly research that helps them climb international league tables
- Yet this often comes at the expense of high-quality research of national interest, to the detriment of society as a whole
Good governance in Singapore risks being undermined by a higher education system that is skewed toward hiring academics unwilling or unable to engage with important public policy research.
One reason for this is the pursuit of rankings. The key metric that most rankings utilise is a so-called citation count – a tally of research associated with any given university that has been published in select international peer-reviewed journals.
Research-focused universities can thus effectively game the system by taking on more academics who meet said criteria, and many aspiring institutions will consequently hire, fire and promote academic staff on the basis of how much research they have had published and where.
Yet because top-ranked journals favour research of theoretical significance and universal applicability in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine, this system disproportionately disadvantages Singaporean scholars, who are more likely than foreigners to have the motivation and capacity to pursue local research in fields such as the humanities, social sciences, business and law.
Foreigners form the majority of permanent academic staff at Singapore’s two best-rated institutions – Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the National University of Singapore (NUS).
This reality could leave the government short-handed when it needs academic help to research a public policy issue in the local economy, for example.
