Ting Pan

Writing 2 / MW 3PM
06/05/2015
Final WP2
University Rankings
Do you know the worldwide ranking of UCSB? Did you think about the rankings when
deciding which university to go to? Whether you are concerned about them or not, university
rankings make a big influence on the field of education and even our whole society. These
rankings widely affect the behaviors of students and their families, university executive
leaders, academic faculty, governments, and investors. Meanwhile, a variety of scholars pay
much attention to this phenomena and have conducted a lot of research and studies about it.
Simon Marginson, who is a professor of International Higher Education, in his piece
University Rankings And Social Science, evaluates six ranking systems by social science
and behavioral criteria. Kwok Tong Soo, a lecturer in Economics at Lancaster University,
estimates the effects of one particular league table of universities on teachers and academics,
and on student applications throughout his work "Does Anyone Use Information From
University Rankings?" There are also many non-academic articles about university rankings
in mainstream media or pop culture. Mary Beth Marklein is an education reporter. In her
article Rankings Create Perverse Incentives - Hazelkorn, she discusses several questions
about such rankings and presents many interesting perspectives. By comparing these three
pieces, scholarly articles attract less audience than non-academic pieces, but they are more
persuasive because of strong evidence.

The first important thing is identifying the genres of each piece. As Bunn suggests in
How to Read Like a Writer, one important thing to consider before reading is the genre of
text because of different genre, these authors make different choices when writing (Bunn 77).
Soo presents his research methods and the results, as well as the whole article is full of data,
so his article is like an academic research report. Marginsons piece is an academic essay. He
writes a long introduction about current university rankings and proposes the relationship
between social science and the rankings. He also introduces eight criteria and applies them to
judge several popular university rankings. Markleins article is hard to be classified. Even if it
appears in news website, this piece is unlike a news article because of containing many
personal opinions. For example, she states I guess my argument is, if you have mutual
respect for different types of institutions you'll have a different dynamic and I think we
have yet to come up with the optimum approach. Also, it is noticeable that Marklein
mentions Ellen Hazelkorn several times, who is the author of the recently released second
edition of Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The battle for world-class
excellence. Therefore, this article is likely to be a review article.
One of the important differences among these pieces is their respective audiences. In
Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking), Boyd argues that every time you go to write anything,
you are making decisions about which words to use and what tone to establish as you order
your thoughts based upon what is appropriate for your intended audience (Boyd 44).
Therefore, intended audience greatly influence the authors decisions. We can identify some
moves these three authors made so that we can determine their target audience.

Marginson writes about aspects of social science, which narrows his audience to those
who are educated in this field. His explanation for the criteria like Materiality,
Externality, Performance alignment, and Transparency seem detailed, but is actually
hard to follow for readers who are not familiar with social science. For instance, one of his
criteria is Objectivity, and his introduction is rankings indicators should eschew subjective
observations using measures such as Likert scales. It is hard for common people to
distinguish between subjectivity and objectivity, but his explanation is just like objectivity is
not subjectivity. Also, Likert scales, which appears in his explanation, is also a
topic-specific term. Therefore, such explanation is unable to eliminate common readers
confusion and the audience of Marginsons piece should be people who educated in social
science.
Although Marginsons audience is narrow, Soos article is written for an even narrower
group of people. He uses many topic-specific terms like dynamic panel data model,
parsimonious specification and Arellano and Bond and there are no explanations
available. Not only may the terms make common people confused, but the equations also
drive them crazy. This is an equation appearing in his piece:

Absolutely, this function with so many Greek letters is not designed for common people.
Therefore, Soos piece is simply written for people who educated in the same discipline as
him.
Different from the two academic articles, Markleins piece is written for a broader
audience, not limited to people in specific fields. On the one hand, unlike the academic

articles, which have restrictions of audience, everyone can get this article via the Internet, so
this article can reach a wider audience than the other two academic texts. On the other hand,
her sentences and words are simple. For example, Marklein writes, But the institutions that
tended to respond, most of them had positive views, most thought rankings were more helpful
than unhelpful (Marklein). To comprehend this sentence, readers are not required to have
other knowledge in particular disciplines, so this piece is able to reach more common people
than the other two academic articles. In addition, to attract more audiences, Marklein decides
to apply informal and conversational tone. Because the fact that most audiences like to read
interesting articles instead of formal and boring academic pieces, such tone effectively make
more people willing to receive the information the author conveys.
Another difference among these articles is the evidence they use. Marginson uses many
sources from other related articles. For example, he quotes Adam Smiths statement in The
Wealth of Nations - The desire of bettering our condition . . . comes with us from the womb,
and never leaves us till we go into the grave (Smith, 1776/1979, p. 441) to claim that the
desire to rise is universal (Marginson 45). He also applies the strategy of hypothetical as
evidence. He writes In an ideal world, it would not matter whether rankings rested on sound
social science. Competition for status would be stilled . . . global university ranking would be
not just undesirable but absurd (Marginson 47). Then, he points out that this is not the world
we inhabit, so oppositely, it is impossible to get rid of university rankings in the foreseeable
future (Marginson 47). Additionally, in the section of Evaluation of Six Current Rankings
Systems, all evidence about these ranking systems are from their official websites. Therefore,

Marginson chooses lots of strong evidence from authentic resources and applies appropriate
strategies, making his work persuasive.
Unlike Marginsons various evidence origins, Soo decides to use statistical approaches
to offer evidence, which are also persuasive. For instance, to prove the government has been
increasing university fees over time, he proposes The Dearing Report of 1997 introduced
fees of 1000 per year for Home undergraduate students starting in 1998. This was increased
to 3000 per year beginning in 2006. Such data can be considered as strong evidence.
Whats more, while Marginson and Soo both apply tables to present evidence in their
scholarly texts, Soos tables are more persuasive. Soo puts all data he uses in these tables, as
well as the result data he finally gets, but Marginson just uses strong and weak to
represent the result. For the audience, numbers are more reliable than words, so Soos tables
with statistics are stronger evidence than Marginsons.
Different from scientific evidences used in these two scholarly texts, Markleins
evidences seem uncertain and undependable. For example, she states My guess on that is,
even if you don't like where you're ranked, it's better to be noticed than not noticed and I
guess my argument is, if you have mutual respect for different types of institutions you'll
have a different dynamic (Marklein). Such conjectures are weak because they just reflect the
authors own opinion.
Compared with scholarly texts, non-academic pieces aim towards a vaster audience.
Non-academic piece is more attractive for common people, because there is less jargon in
non-academic pieces and they can easily understand the content of the article. Also, when
writing non-academic pieces, the authors have the freedom to present their own perspectives

without worrying about if the audience agrees with it or not. For instance, when it comes to
US higher education, Marklein argues that US completion rates, attrition, the levels of student
debt, the cost, and affordability are shocking (Marklein). Such critical move forces the
audience to feel worried and think seriously. Therefore, unlike boring academic and scientific
works, such personal opinion articles attract more common people.
On the contrary, there are many restrictions about writing scholarly pieces, which
narrow their audiences but make them authentic and persuasive. Sufficient evidence and
academic tone is crucial for scholarly texts but much of this scientific evidence is hard to
comprehend by common people. Academics and scholars prefer scholarly pieces to
non-academic texts, because they can understand the scholarly texts and these articles may
encourage them to do some related researches. Also, information gathered in non-academic
pieces is not all credible, but scholarly pieces are typically based on facts and data.
As a summary, on the one side, the non-academic piece attracts more common people
because of simple expressions and arguable personal opinions. On the other side, academic
pieces are written for scholars and more persuasive, especially data-based articles. Hopefully,
both scholarly and non-academic works promote the development of higher education.

Works Cited
Bunn, Mike. How to Read Like a Writer. Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. West
Lafayette, IN: Parlor, 2010. N. pag. Print.
Boyd, Janet. "Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking)." Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. West
Lafayette, IN: Parlor, 2010. N. pag. Print.
Marginson, Simon. "University Rankings And Social Science." European Journal Of
Education 49.1 (2014): 45-59. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 May 2015
Marklein, Mary Beth. "Rankings Create Perverse Incentives." University
World News. 10 Apr. 2015. Web. 03 May 2015.
Soo, Kwok Tong. "Does Anyone Use Information From University Rankings?" Education
Economics 21.2 (2013): 176-190. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 May 2015.