As Times Higher Education announce the launch of data collection for the next round of the THE Impact Ratings, it’s worth revisiting the principles, and the driving concepts that I built the methodology around. These principles still shape every submission today.
A different understanding of university excellence
The Impact Ratings were designed from the ground up as a new approach to understanding university excellence. They weren’t based primarily around research performance or reputation. Instead I looked at the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a starting point.
However, I didn’t want to create a new framework. Instead, I wanted to be able to understand higher education’s contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals in a much wider way than had been done before, keeping as close as possible to the existing targets and indicators.
Avoiding a new framework created a ranking that is as closely matched to the SDGs as possible, and something that is very different to the approaches adopted by other organisations such as the QS Sustainability Rankings.
Open-ended questions lead to challenging choices
I wanted the rankings to be open to every kind of institution and university mission, not just the research elite. This meant writing open-ended questions and allowing contextual responses that take documentary evidence, rather than relying on numerical input. This choice was crucial in making the rankings more inclusive, but also harder for universities to get right.
Universities must match their evidence precisely to the question and the underlying SDG indicator. And since THE have decided to cap the number of pieces of evidence that can be submitted, that choice has become a significant lever on scores, potentially more than the underlying activity itself.
Institutions cannot afford to treat evidence selection as an afterthought. It is the crux of the submission exercise. It’s also one where you can’t rely on the methodology alone.
Participating in the Impact Ratings is less straightforward than participating in other rankings. It requires more work, and universities have to match the documents they provide to the specific question and to the underlying SDG indicator. The universities that do best are the ones that understand the methodology well enough to demonstrate their case document by document, indicator by indicator.
Worth thinking about as this round opens.
First published on LinkedIn.
