Howard Davies: Any excuse for a party. Even league tables...

Thursday 10 November 2005 01:00 GMT
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The Malaysians and Singaporeans - united here if not there - are party-givers extraordinaire. The Scandinavian pub-crawlers are in full swing too, rivalling the Central and Eastern European Development Society ("free shots" is their USP). Last week, even, "The Frogs they had a party", as the posters proclaimed. And if, after all these excitements, you are sober enough the next morning, you can get free Chinese lessons in the street. Ni hao. It's only the Brits who lack something to celebrate. I suggested a thrash to mark the start of the Higher Education Funding Council's teaching grant consultation, but there were no takers. Maybe the eventual outcome on post-qualifications admissions will be exciting enough to provoke dancing in the street.

While the net effect of all this multi-ethnic jollification can be tough on the liver (thank goodness for the Islamic Society, I say) the consequences for the LSE could not be better. The new Times Higher Education Supplement university league tables also emerged last week - though if there was a launch party I was not invited. One of the indicators is the "international student score", which accounts for five per cent of the overall marks: maybe not quite as crucial as the number of citations per faculty member, but not to be sniffed at, nonetheless. And it is the one measure where the LSE knocks Harvard into a cocked hat.

I have had to deal with league tables in previous jobs. Management consultants like McKinsey are typically ranked by billings per partner. The Audit Commission was, and is, fertile in the production of tables on almost anything that moves in local government. There are tables of central-bank cost-effectiveness (usually held in the decent obscurity that characterises central banking) and even a sort of league table of financial regulators. The FSA was, internationally, the least popular - apart from all the others.

It is an iron rule, I have found, that enthusiasm for any particular table on the part of an organisation listed in it is tightly correlated with the position at which that organisation appears. Just at the moment, we Manchester City supporters think the Premiership quite accurately reflects the quality of our team, after many years in which the table has failed properly to measure intrinsic worth. So with the LSE holding its position in the global first 11, and tucked in at number two in social sciences (after the inevitable Harvard) we can afford to take a relatively positive view.

And yet, it is clear that some funny things are going on. This year Sciences Po in Paris climbed at least 131 places, from outside the top 200 to 69th this year (knowing the place quite well, I am inclined to think that 2004 rank was the oddity). By contrast, University of California, Santa Barbara fell almost 90 places. It must have been a bad year in the Valley. Looking at the individual components, our international-student score is 100 times that of Penn State and the Ecole Polytechnique's faculty/student score is five times that of Harvard. I wonder. Ranking anoraks will no doubt tease out more oddities than this. I am a party animal these days, not a statistician. But their conclusions, I forecast, are likely to suggest buckets of salt as an accompaniment to this latest dish served up for our consumption by the fourth estate.

Could a better, more accurate and stable set of rankings be devised? Almost certainly. It would require some investment, no doubt, and rather greater involvement from universities themselves. It might pull together the various different efforts now made by The Times, The Guardian and Shanghai Jiao Tong. But I hope it doesn't happen. A really meaningful and comprehensive league table would be a terrible nuisance for all of us. Prospective students, faculty and research funders might put their decisions on autopilot, which would be a big mistake. So let's let a thousand tables bloom, and get back to the parties.

The writer is the director of the London School of Economics

education@independent.co.uk

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