League tables are loved and hated - with reason. A spur to improvement, they are necessarily uncomfortable. They are also unfair, open to manipulation and do not measure vital aspects of university education such as inspiration, friendship and intellectual challenge.
Each year The THES publishes, in association with The Times, a set of separate tables rather than aggregating data from different sources into a single table. We would like to develop more tables so the diversity of universities shows more clearly. Instead, we are likely to be driven back to fewer as the half-dozen indicators being developed at the government's behest come to dominate all others.
One of those indicators, employability, is hotly contested by vice-chancellors (page 1) and education secretary David Blunkett (page 16).The row surfaced just as the restructuring plan for Thames Valley University was published. That plan is for a pared-down university concentrated around four faculties geared to getting students jobs - in health, the media, tourism and services. Teaching is to have high priority,research low. While this may please Mr Blunkett, others will dismiss it as "mere training" hardly suited to a "university".
This knotty issue, where status, tradition and snobbery get tangled up with practicality, was tackled this week by the rector of the Royal College of Art, Christopher Frayling, in a lecture, "The Flight of the Phoenix". The challenge is how to educate people to do useful and valued things; to do them with skill; and yet not to constrain their creativity and imagination. The RCA has in its history emphasised one or the other but, as Frayling says, the trick is to combine all three.
Today's graduates, if well taught on vocationally relevant courses, may go straight into jobs giving their university a boost in the employment league table. But that is not enough. More important is that they should have the confidence and imagination to go on to create new jobs and industries undreamt of by today's planners, employers, course designers and education ministers. Hard to measure that.