‘Judgement’ versus ‘metrics’ in higher education management

Abstract

This article argues that universities currently privilege an instrumental ethos of measurement in the management of academic work. Such an ethos has deleterious consequences, both for knowledge production and knowledge transfer to students. Specifically, evidence points towards the production of increasingly well-crafted and ever more numerous research outputs that are useful in permitting universities to posture as world class institutions but that ultimately are of questionable social value. Additionally, the ever more granular management of teaching and pedagogy in universities is implicated in the sacrifice of broad and deep intellectual enquiry in favour of ostensibly more economically relevant skills that prepare graduates for the travails of the labour market. In both cases, metric fetishization serves to undermine nobler, socially minded visions of what a university should be. For such visions to flourish, it is imperative that universities take steps that explicitly privilege a collegial ethos of judgement over a managerialist ethos of measurement.

The ‘Lunar Side’ of the Story: Exploring the Sustainability of Curricular Internships in Higher Education

“…This support could be given, inter alia, by internship offices or commissions. In fact, the public movement of HEIs in adopting curricular internships [25,33] and the investment in communicating this type of strategy to the general public contrast with the lack of supportive structures and administrative staff training. One HEI (CASE A) stood out by mentioning that even the existent support leaves much room for improvements.…”

“…As a response, a growing number of HEIs have been using internships as a mean of communicating to students and the wider community their commitment to graduate employment [24,32]. In fact, several studies report that internship experiences tend to constitute a recruitment criterion [12,15,33,34], enhancing the possibility of acquiring references, which may be crucial for future career moves. Each internship placement allows students to integrate a 'professional network', giving him/her the opportunity to 'socialize' with several professionals that may constitute key contacts (in the best scenario, a future 'employer') in the effort of getting a first job [34][35][36].…”

“…The growing practice of integrating internship experiences by HEIs in the recent years in Portugal [4], as well as at a global level [33] and, therefore, the growing need to inform institutional managers on how to implement more sustainable strategies of internships justified the re-analysis of each focus group, focusing on identifying the 'lunar side' of internships. Therefore, a second content analysis of the four focus group sessions was conducted with the support of the software WebQDA ® .…”

Rankings analysis with the Optimized Pareto method.

“…The universities are the institutions with the major challenge because the rankings are the most common strategy to categorize their quality and some rankings ignore some factors about researching, teaching and pedagogy. It is a big problem because the universities must respond to multiple rankings [30].…”

Massification, Marketisation and Loss of Differentiation in Pre-Entry Marketing Materials in UK Higher Education

“…If, as research into outcomes of undergraduate degrees suggests, there are significant differentiations of outcomes and a public perception has grown that some are not 'worthwhile qualifications' (Bathmaker 2015, p. 64), institutions' pre-entry materials matter. Differentiation in degree outcomes is very hard to measure qualitatively, though league tables enumerate different value judgements of higher education institutions for public consumption (Spence 2018). The league tables indicate a significant difference in outcomes between an elite top-rated provider such as University College London, and the University of East London.…”