THE’s Impact Rankings reward Aus unis engaged

John Ross, Explaining the growing fervour for THE’s Impact Rankings, Times Higher Education, June 2025

Good morning

There was a buzz in the air when 2,000-plus delegates gathered in Bangkok this time last year for the Global Sustainable Development Congress. No doubt it’s every bit as buzzy in Istanbul this year.

I’ve been to more than my share of higher education conferences in the past 18-odd years, but the sustainable development summits seem to strike a special chord. They sidestep issues about what higher education is, beelining straight to the question of what it’s for. Clean water and sanitation. Affordable and clean energy. Peace, justice and strong institutions. These are things people can really get behind, and they help explain the growing fervour for THE’s Impact Rankings, which assessed the efforts of more than 2,500 universities this year – up from about 450 in its first outing just six years ago.

Rankings have their critics. The reliance on metrics; the methodological choices; the vulnerability to gaming; the commercial orientation; the Western skew; the cherry-picking by institutions anxious to present themselves in the best possible light.

Taking all that on board, it’s refreshing to see universities such as Western Sydney, Kyungpook in Korea, Aalborg in Denmark and Airlangga in Indonesia supplanting usual suspects like Oxford, Harvard, MIT and Princeton. The Impact Rankings make space for universities that are “really engaged” as anchor institutions in their communities, says Verity Firth, vice-president for societal impact, equity and engagement at UNSW Sydney. “They make a huge difference to their local communities or their regional economies, or even their nation states. That is not celebrated enough by global rankings that look purely to more traditional measures of academic output.”

One view is that rankings like this risk diverting universities from their central raison d’être – the creation and dissemination of knowledge, arguably best captured by the traditional measures. Good outcomes inevitably flow from knowledge, but if universities put the cart before the horse they risk compromising their mission, undermining their neutrality and inviting scepticism about their discoveries by confusing academia with activism.

Firth, who is also chair of Engagement Australia, takes a different view. “Yes, we exist to teach and to research, but we also exist to partner with others for public benefit.” At a time when “antagonistic” governments question the sector’s value, it’s in universities’ interests to highlight their work addressing “the most intractable problems of our age”.

That doesn’t rule out curiosity-driven research that might never have practical benefits, Firth stresses. “You can’t be so impact-focused that you no longer provide space or funding or time for blue-sky research. Deep thinking and original research…that is a really important thing for people to do [but] that’s not all that universities should do.”

It’s a debate that goes back to the Chicago Principles almost 60 years ago, and won’t be settled any time soon. In the meantime, Australian universities are again the clear front-runners in the Impact Rankings. Not a bad effort from institutions in a country ranked 37th for its progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

– John Ross, Asia-Pacific editor
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