公共问责与市场竞争:大学排名难以承受之重

Dilemma and Solutions of University Rankings for Accountability and Competition

理想的大学排名目的和意义在于，作为服务于公共问责的有益工具，为排名使用者提供关于大学教育质量的可靠信息，同时激励大学提升质量。然而，当前大学排名所采用的大部分指针与院校选择性程度高度相关，为学生提供的大学教育质量信息不充分;且由于大学排名主要是大学教育作为准商品参与市场竞争的产物，指针设计偏重于高等教育对训练人力和发展科研的价值，忽视学生个人发展、教育公平等这些隐蔽但影响深远的社会价值，导致高等教育生态恶化，社会不公加剧。要解决这些问题，“教育增值”评价的发展是一个可能的改进途径，但不是根本的解决之道。归根结底，大学排名只是众多评价方式之一，不应也不可能承担质量评价的全部责任。

The idealistic purpose of university ranking is to encourage the self-improvement of universities as well as providing reliable information to users on higher education quality for public accountability. Nevertheless， most current rankings advocate indices related highly to the academic selectivity of institutions， while having nothing to do with quality of their performances. At the same time， since the rankings are mostly pushed by competition among universities as quasi-merchandise， it was inevitable that some social values of higher education as labor training and research were emphasized more than others such as student individual development and social justice， which are more invisible but influential from a long term. The rankings therefore ruined the ecology of higher education competition and made social injustice more serious. Value-added evaluation might bring some light to the darkness of rankings but not the primary way to solve the problem since it is functioned as one of the many measures in quality assessment.