Accounting & Finance Research Community Seminar – Florian Gebreiter

Title: Rankings, inequality, and the democratisation of knowledge: how students from different socio-economic backgrounds use league tables in choosing universities

Date: 29 March 2023
Time: 14:00-15:15
Location: NUBS 2.14

Guest Speaker: Florian Gebreiter is an Associate Professor in Accounting at Birmingham Business School. His principal research interests lie in two areas. First, he examines accounting, accountability and control practices in the public and not-for-profit sectors. Second, he researches issues relating to recruitment, diversity, social mobility and professional socialisation at accounting firms. His research has been published in a range of international journals including Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, British Accounting Review, Critical Perspectives on Accounting and European Accounting Review.

If you would like to attend, please register using the following link: https://forms.office.com/r/BBxTzTbZsV.

Abstract
Neo-liberal policy makers suggest that rankings and other performance indicators promote equality in the use of public services as they make information on the quality and effectiveness of such services more accessible to people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Whether these suggestions hold in practice, however, remains unclear. This paper examines how university rankings affect the university choices of British students from different socio-economic backgrounds, and to what extent such rankings “democratise” knowledge and thus promote greater equality in the context of students’ university choices. The paper shows that the university choices of students from lower socio-economic backgrounds were to a large extent driven by rankings. Students from higher socio-economic backgrounds, by contrast, were often sceptical of the value of rankings and paid less attention to them. Instead, they tended to emphasise membership of the Russell Group (an association of large, research-intensive public universities) as the key determinant in choosing their university. The findings of the paper indicate that rankings are a partial and unreliable mechanism for democratising knowledge about public services and that they do as much harm as good in the context of promoting equality in the context of university choices. The findings moreover highlight some limits of the power of rankings and point towards potential strategies for resisting these tools.