Vice-chancellor Grant Robertson said at a university council meeting this month that it had established a working group, featuring professional and academic leaders, to tackle the world rankings situation.
It comes after Otago University last year fell from the 301-350 band of universities to 351-400 in the Times Higher Education rankings, its lowest position on the league table.
Deputy vice-chancellor Prof Jessica Palmer, who is heading the working group, told the Otago Daily Times yesterday she would be able to outline some of their plans at next month’s senate meeting, but rankings were important.
"They are a significant factor for attraction to the university by international students and importantly international staff.
"So, whether or not they accurately reflect what’s happening within an institution, they are nevertheless used as an external benchmark by students and staff internationally."
The international higher education analyst QS Quacquarelli Symonds’ 21st annual edition of the QS World University Rankings also showed that Otago dropped from 206th to 214th.
It remained the second-highest ranked New Zealand university, but was still well behind Auckland (65th).
Prof Palmer said it wanted to lift not only the university’s position, but also educate staff about the ranking criteria.
"It’s about helping to educate the university community as to how the ranking systems work and what they’re based on.
"That’s quite tricky because the criteria that the different rankings bodies use changes from year to year."
Over the next few months, Prof Palmer said the group would put in place "some quite specific workstreams or actions so that we can start [to] address some of the ways in which rankings are measured".
The university also wanted its travelling academics to think about what they could do to improve the rankings.
Prof Palmer said the university regularly corresponded with the rankings agencies.
"It’s been really important for us to have them around and show them on the ground what is amazing about Otago.
"Our pastoral care, our physical location, the sense of community of this university — these are the really special facts of the university that don’t necessarily come to a strong end in some of the ranking criteria presently being used."
Universities New Zealand chief executive Dr Chris Whelan said in the past decade, rankings of universities had become an "industry".
"It’s fair to say we’ve got very mixed feelings about them.
"A number of organisations — QS, Times Higher, Shanghai Ranking — worked out that there was actually big money in promoting league tables and selling consulting services to universities to help them look better and better."
Dr Whelan said the rankings methodologies were often flawed.
"What tends to get reported is what’s reasonably easy to measure and they’re not necessarily the things that matter, say, to students.
"So rankings are notoriously bad at doing things like measuring, say, employment outcomes or the value-add that a university does in terms of its teaching and learning."
However, such was the importance placed on rankings, it helped influence international student recruitment and joint research projects, Dr Whelan said.
"For New Zealand, almost all of our most highly cited research has been done in collaboration with researchers overseas.
"It’s things like rankings that open the door for a lot of those collaborations."
New Zealand universities were therefore "very strategic" in terms of how they used rankings.
"They’re so important now, no university can afford to ignore them."
