The Spectator Index, a watchdog which focuses on politics, economics, history, military affairs, sports, science and technology, has tweeted a list of 137 countries where quality education prevails.
Starting with Switzerland on the top, it includes India and Pakistan. India is ranked 34th whereas Pakistan stands at 94th position. The last and 137th country is Yemen.
Traditional approaches to assessing higher education have relied on collegiality, expert judgment and peer review. There has been a strong emphasis on quality improvement and quality enhancement and the promotion and embedding of a quality culture.
Norms of academic-professional self-regulation and self-governance, with ownership and responsibility resting with autonomous higher education institutions, prevail. But such practice has been ridiculed as too process-oriented and box-ticking and insufficiently focused on consequential and generalisable outcomes.
Such critique is not isolated to a particular country or geographic region; rather, it seems to be global. The growth and expansion of global university rankings is but one illustration of the salience and the contested nature of higher education quality, performance and productivity.