Bernadette Soriano

Each year, the QS World University Rankings land—and like clockwork, the spectacle begins. PR teams go full throttle, faculty chase citations, alumni cling to borrowed clout. “Globally competitive,” the headlines say. But beneath the noise, a harder truth: we're chasing mirrors, not meaning.


So sure, QS and Times Higher Education (THE) are flawless yardsticks—if your goal is this: sound British, look Oxford-adjacent, and publish where no one here reads. Who cares about community needs or local impact—those are fluff. Real achievement? Mastering the Oxford cosplay of higher education, full uniform and citation badges included.

This is isn’t just about prestige. It is about power, cloaked in metrics, is really the quiet engine here. As Michael Foucault reminds us, authority often hides in the scaffolding of “normalcy,” in the very standards that whisper what counts, what is excellent—and what is forgotten. So universities don’t just chase rankings: they absorb them, morphing mission and community into footnotes. Until institutional conscience fades—and the optional becomes orthodoxy.

In the university, that means adjusting language to sound more peer-reviewed than rooted, swapping fieldwork for frameworks, or shelving a thesis on urban poor pedagogy because it “won’t index well.” Little decisions, made in committee rooms and draft folders, pile into something structural. And over time, institutions forget that rankings were once optional, that excellence once had context. What remains is performance—refined, referential, but often emptied of place.

University administrators know the drill: court international hires, chase Scopus, trim ratios, inflate citations. Budgets follow the performance—visibility over validity, optics over outcome. The illusion: progress. The cost: everything else.

In Mindanao, an extension office dissolved for exchange credentials; in various HEIs—including Ifugao State University, where community literacy efforts like “Catch Me and Teach Me” are well-documented  — extension programs exist, yet institutions still funnel staff and space into grant-speak fluency. 

These decisions are not irrational—they are rational responses to irrational standards.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called it symbolic violence: when institutions uphold the very hierarchies that erase them—convinced that prestige, even when punishing, is still the only currency that counts.

Immanuel Kant draws the line clean: autonomy (“acting from”) and heteronomy, (“action in accord”). But psychology complicates the map—tracing why institutions, like doctoral candidates mid-dissertation, default to compliance not from conviction, but from exhaustion, conditioning, the quiet calculus of survival. To follow, after all, is often less perilous than to question what’s been set.

A grad student rewrites her thesis—not to reflect belief, but to mirror the advisor’s language. It passes. She moves on. But the cost—small, silent—is clarity. This is how autonomy frays: not through refusal, but through adaptation that forgets its origin.

According to David McClelland’s Need Theory, many high-achievers possess a dominant “need for achievement”—a drive that, while generative, can easily backfire. When success is defined narrowly and externally—through grades, rubrics, or global rankings—that need often shifts: from a pursuit of mastery to an obsession with performance, polished for validation over depth.

A student joins every leadership seminar, not out of interest, but because it “looks good” on his CV. Reflection gives way to résumé-building. Achievement, once internal, becomes something to curate, not cultivate.

Neuroscience affirms it: under anxiety and rigidity, the prefrontal cortex—the seat of complex reasoning—dulls. Rubrics tighten, reflection thins. Carol Dweck calls it the fixed mindset: when validation outranks learning, ambiguity feels like threat, and risk, a liability. Curiosity folds under pressure to get it “right.”

It plays out in classrooms. A doctoral student stalls when asked to reflect—no prompts, no scaffolding. Not because they lack insight, but because they’ve learned to equate thinking with compliance, and uncertainty with failure.

This isn’t just bureaucratic—it’s cultural. Geert Hofstede notes the Philippines scores high in power distance and uncertainty avoidance: a pairing that primes us to obey, to crave structure, to trust the rubric more than the reason. Compliance, in this frame, isn’t weakness—it’s habit.

This isn’t new—it’s inherited. Colonization replaced indigenous systems with imported templates: the friars’ schools, the American curriculum, each designed less to cultivate thought than to condition obedience. We weren’t taught to question—only to qualify.

Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, warned that colonial education systems train the oppressed to adopt the logic of their oppressors. The irony cuts deep—Filipino universities now chase validation from systems never meant to see them, much less center them.

Take the Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP), which recently diverted substantial resources toward ASEAN and ABET accreditations—hiring international liaison officers, restructuring programs for AUN‑QA compliance, and channeling funds to international faculty exchanges. Meanwhile, community‑centered offerings—such as local-language workshops or rural internship programs—receive little to no attention. It’s not just a shift in priorities: it’s a reorientation of institutional identity toward global optics and away from local relevance.

A railroad is optimized: efficient, predetermined, closed to detours. It gets you there—but only where others have already been. A compass, by contrast, offers no track—just direction. It permits the messy: deviation, drift, even failure. Not arrival, but orientation.

Leadership today demands compasses, not keys. Climate collapse, AI upheaval, political volatility—none of these come with answer sheets. They are wicked problems: shifting, paradoxed, resistant to rubrics. And yet we train students with checklists, as if the future were a quiz you could pass.

As the 2025 Ateneo valedictorian put it “Solo el que ensaya lo absurdo,” to lead through chaos is to risk the irrational. Leadership isn’t about “following best practices”; it’s about inventing them. Not direction, but discernment. Not precedent, but presence.

The late entry of Ateneo de Manila University into global rankings was no strategic delay—it was principled restraint. Under Fr. Bienvenido Nebres, S.J., Ateneo resisted the rush not out of indifference but out of integrity, asking: “What is excellence for, if not in service of others?” 

When QS‑THE rankings beckoned, Ateneo joined only after aligning its mission with these benchmarks—and even then, did so as a measure, not master—a sentiment Fr. Nebres articulated when he cautioned that rankings “did not adequately reflect the university’s progress or how well it has been working toward achieving its mission-vision.”

Under Fr. Nebres, Ateneo doubled down on what didn’t rank well but mattered deeply: community-rooted research, public school partnerships, ethical formation. No citation spikes. No global applause. But there was impact—in governance reform, in post-disaster work, in lives moved from precarity to possibility.

When Ateneo entered the QS rankings, it did so on its own terms—anchored, not chasing. This is what autonomy looks like when it’s discerned, not delegated.

Imagine if we measured universities not by global citations, but by what they leave behind. Policies shaped. First-generation scholars who found dignified work. Barangays with cleaner water, safer streets. A ceasefire held two weeks longer because someone trained in conflict mediation showed up. What if impact, not prestige, were the metric?

These aren’t utopian metrics—they exist, just off the record. Tracked in footnotes, tucked in extension reports, dismissed as “non-competitive.” But they’re the ones that stay.

Doctoral assessment, too, can be reimagined. Not as academic choreography for approval, but as co-authorship. In Finland and parts of the Netherlands, some programs already let students define their own metrics—trusting reflection as inquiry, not performance. The question shifts: not “Did you meet the standard?” but “Whose standard, and why?”

It takes nerve to step outside systems that reward the polished over the purposeful. But precedent exists. The University of the Philippines has begun shaping a performance index rooted in national context. Some regional universities now fund action research without chasing citations, others publish in peer-reviewed vernacular. The shift is quiet—but it’s happening.

That courage can begin where it’s most proximate: the classroom. Faculty can make space for complexity. Administrators can reward depth over display. Students can be seen—not just for ‘getting it right’, but for asking why it matters at all.

When the compass spins, we don’t reach for rankings—we return to values. Not the rubric, but the questions that hold weight: Who is this for? Whose life shifts because of it? And what do we risk by choosing it, still?

As the world urges us to align, perform, brand—remember: prestige without purpose is polished compliance. Real leadership doesn’t race to the scoreboard. It stops. Looks around. And asks who wrote the rules, and who gets left out of the win.

And sometimes, it doesn’t just question the game—it leaves it. Not aimless, but guided. Compass in hand.