Educationalist Peter Scott says that Higher Education, with the compulsive need to be always near the top of the table, is not like the Premier league, but "...treating higher education as if it were a game, corrupts. A good “student experience”, now an obligatory phrase, is not increased or diminished simply because it is ranked higher or lower in some crazy table. The real value of science and scholarship cannot be measured by whether those who undertake the underlying research have had lots of external grants (the bigger the better) or get published in highly cited journals or by top-flight university presses.
Peter Scott is professor of higher education studies at the UCL Institute of Education and currently ranked 11th best UK university.
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