This post was authored by Jelena Brankovic, Astrid Van den Bossche and Morten Hansen, and originally published on LSE Impact for Social Sciences
How do students think about rankings? We often encounter claims that university rankings exist for students, that students ‘use’ them as a valuable source of information, and that they ultimately shape their decisions about where to study.
These claims aren’t just promoted by ranking organisations; they are echoed by university administrators, policymakers, and various kinds of higher education experts. While it is certainly true that some students take rankings seriously, the evidence of rankings’ actual importance in this respect is thin. At the same time, many discussions about rankings tend to oversimplify student judgment, offering little insight into how today’s students think about university reputation or status.
To explore how students actually engage with rankings, we studied prominent student vloggers on YouTube. We wanted to see how they make sense of rankings in a pluralised digital environment, critically engage with the ideas of university status and reputation, and talk to their peers about what matters for them when it comes to choosing between universities.
Rankings, we argue, should be understood as a genre in their own right. This allows us to see rankings both as something ‘out there’ that most students will recognise, and as something they can ‘talk back to’, effectively challenging the logic underpinning rankings, which is that everything can be neatly organised into a hierarchy.
With the aim of untangling the rhetorics that promote as well as disrupt this hierarchal logic, we conducted a move analysis of 30 videos produced by student vloggers. In these videos, vloggers either react to an existing ranking or they make their own by tiering universities or colleges.
In reaction videos, the vloggers reveal well-known university rankings line by line, ostensibly for the first time, giving their audience a front-seat to their off-the-cuff responses. Laced with humour and a touch of theatricality, these videos reveal where rankings align with expectations—and where they do not.
However, vloggers do not just react to existing rankings, they also take matters into their own hands. In ‘tier list’ videos, the vloggers begin by making a judicious selection of institutions, which they then proceed to group into banded tiers, offering justifications along the way. Nightlife, anecdotal encounters, the quality of canteen food—all play a role in determining whether University A deserves a higher rank than University B.
In the video below, which inspired the title of our article — ‘Rankings are all bullsh*t anyway, why not do my own?’ — we see Clouds, one of the vloggers in our sample, tiering a select group of London universities based on her opinions and experiences.
The vloggers are ruthless and occasionally kind. Goldsmiths students are ‘Hufflepuffs’; Chichester is unpronounceable. Dartmouth receives an ‘F’ for ‘Frats on Farms’. Yet underneath the humour is a much more revealing insight: formal rankings are balanced and counterbalanced with anecdote, sentiment, and lived experience. Students at highly ranked universities might find themselves taken down a peg; those at less prestigious institutions find their choices and experiences validated.
Our central argument is that these vloggers are effectively remediating the ranking genre. That is, in dislodging it from its ‘natural habitat’ under the aegis of large corporate publishers, they are reshaping audience expectations. Social media has wrested control over the metric-focused narratives often emphasised by the big rankers, who insist that their methodologies are so sound and objective that all institutions compete on equal footing. Our vloggers know this is a fable that makes for entertaining social media content.
Our findings thus complicate the usual accounts of students’ reading rankings simply as being indicative of a university’s actual ‘quality’ or ‘worth’. We would argue that these findings do more justice to students as critical thinkers and active participants in their own educational journeys. Students do not just read evaluations; they make their own.
As evaluators of universities, these student vloggers are saying the quiet part out loud: the relevance and power that rankings hold do not come from their supposed objectivity. Rather, they come from how they allow us to imagine and playact the perspectives of other observers of higher education, be that employers, students, or the vlogger’s audiences.
While rankings may play a role in how some students think about higher education, the way they actually judge universities against each other is a much more complex process than often assumed. We hope our study contributes to a better understanding of this phenomenon, and that it will inspire others to recognise the voice students do have and push this understanding forward.
