Meritocracy and University Rankings: how League Tables can Reproduce Inequality in Higher Education
Creators: name: Trevisan, Francesca
Publisher: name: University of Surrey
Year: 2022

description: Meritocracy is a central tenet of contemporary societies. University rankings list Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) in a meritocratic hierarchical order. Despite increasing concerns about university rankings' uses and misuses, research has not assessed yet how university rankings affect students’ intergroup relations and rankings' link to ideologies that justify inequalities among students. This thesis aims at: i) providing an overview of how meritocracy has been psychologised, ii) investigating how university rankings affect students' intergroup relations, and iii) assessing how students' beliefs about university rankings relate to meritocracy and the distributive justice principle of equity vs. equality and need. The first aim was pursued through a critical review of how meritocracy came to be psychologized and measured by psychologists. The second and third aims were addressed through six empirical studies. <br>
description: <br>
description: Study 1, Study 2 and Study 3 (ntotal=549) explored the effect of rankings on students' intergroup relations. Study 1 and 2 used university rankings and bogus information about graduates' perspective income to explore whether they affected students' evaluation of the ingroup and the outgroup on meritocratic (e.g., intelligent, hard-working) and non-meritocratic traits (e.g., honest, friendly). Results show that university rankings and graduates' perspective income affected students' evaluations of an outgroup on meritocratic traits when the ingroup was involved in the social comparison (Study 1) as well as when the ingroup was not involved in the social comparison (Study 2). Study 3 investigated whether the effect found in Studies 1 and 2 could be replicated when including only information about university rankings and with a generalized students' group. Consistently with Study 1 and Study 2, results show that students stereotyped other university students on meritocratic competence-based traits so that high-ranked university students were judged as more intelligent, skilled and hard-working than students attending low-ranked universities.<br>
description: <br>
description: Studies 4, 5 and 6 (ntotal=1025) investigated the ideological ground of university rankings. Study 4 investigated whether meritocracy plays a role in the legitimisation of students' beliefs about university rankings. Results show that students' beliefs about meritocracy legitimised their beliefs about university rankings. Study 5 tested the legitimising role of meritocracy as a justice principle. Analyses show that the distributive justice principle of equity, but not equality and need legitimised students' beliefs about university rankings. Lastly, Study 6 used an experimental design to test whether university rankings based on different principles (e.g. meritocracy vs. egalitarianism) could socialise students into different justice principles and whether students' default understanding of ranking was aligned with meritocratic principles. Analyses show that students' endorsement of different justice principles (e.g. equity vs. equality vs. need) did not change depending on the condition and that the default understanding of rankings was linked to meritocratic values. Furthermore, findings highlighted that students would readily accept a university ranking system based on egalitarian values.<br>
description: <br>
description: Overall, the results from this thesis indicate that students link university rankings to a meritocratic justification of the social order both at an intergroup and at an ideological level. From an intergroup standpoint, rankings afford the beliefs that students attending high-ranked universities are more talented, skilled, and hard-working than students attending low-ranked universities. From an ideological standpoint, students' beliefs about rankings are linked to meritocracy, and to a meritocratic conception of social justice that discards the principles of equality and need. Results are discussed in terms of how university rankings can reproduce patterns of inequality.<br>