michael_nielsen

Rankings self-reinforce. Employers more likely to hire students from top-ranked universities, so best students go to top-ranked places, making employers even likelier to hire from there and so on. Same effect in terms faculty recruitment, funding, grad student recruitment, etc.

If that's the only axis for competition, sure. But this effect didn't save DEC from being beaten by Google, Myspace from Facebook, etc.

I don't know much about DEC, but I was an active user of Myspace/Friendster at the time Facebook began, and both were unusable (page loading times >40 secs). Perhaps the moral is that large self-reinforcing effects persist in the face of large screwups...

Blockbuster / Netflix. Toyota / name your favourite defunct car company. Etc x 1,000. The point is flux is common among industries where there's actual competition. The chart suggests research universities aren't really competing.

I'm a fan of Bryan Caplan's argument that education is primarily about signalling. By contrast, choosing between Blockbuster/Netflix is about watching a movie. So if school X does figure out a better way to teach than Harvard, it won't draw many students away from Harvard...

That was my original point: real competition seems to have largely been moved out of the system. (Education/Caplan is not relevant: most of the Shanghai ranking is based on research. Regard it as a ranking of research institutions.)

Schools do compete, though -- I've been to about 100 different meetings across 5 institutions where people discuss how to improve ranking. New programs are started all the time, new majors, old programs closed down, etc. Caplan's thesis is relevant because it explains why...

Let me be explicit: the Shanghai rankings aren't principally about education. They're about research. I am talking about research, and have been since the initial tweet. Caplan's thesis is interesting, but largely irrelevant to the current subject.