By Wen Ya

The Ministry of Education strongly opposes all university rankings, most especially those rankings based on payment of certain “fees”, ministry spokeswoman Xu Mei said Tuesday.

The sharp comments came in response to a recent story that Chengdu University of Technology(CDUT) had possibly paid to climb the “China university rankings” table compiled by the self-titled “China University Evaluation Program of Chinese Academy of Management Science” at http://edu.sina.com.cn/focus/utop.html.

The university had invited “program director” Wu Shulian to lecture in 2004 and in 2006, a source at the university told the Beijing-based People’s Daily.

After Wu had received his 50,000 yuan “remittance”, the school’s ranking rose from 116 in 2004 to 92 in 2007. It fell to 103 in 2009, People’s Daily reported Tuesday.

The rankings released by Wu’s organization have been running for about 10 years and until recently were regarded as the most influential of their kind in China.

Wu continued to insist his organization belonged to the science research institute of the Chinese Academy of Management Science even as the academy secretary-general Zhang Naijian confirmed there’s no such institute in his academy, People’s Daily reported.

Wu admitted in his e-mail to the daily paper that he went to CDUT twice and received a “consultancy fee” from them.

The university also admitted on its website homepage later Tuesday that in both 2004 and 2006 they had invited Wu as a “consultant” on development and construction: that earned him a fee which had nothing to do with the rankings.

“It’s routine to offer a retainer and consultancy fee to outside scholars,” the anonymous university statement alleged.

The university had already been assessed as “excellent” by the Ministry of Education in 2007 and “it was unnecessary to improve its prestige or ranking.”

Yet a 2004 briefing released by the university’s Higher Education Evaluation Center stated, “Rankings directly affect the prestige of the university and all resources including the quality of applicants and funds,” according to People’s Daily.

Wu bargained over the fee during his visit to the university, an insider told People’s Daily.

The rise in its ranking after Wu got paid in 2004 was not linked to the fee but because of the progress the university had made in those years, teachers in the university told the paper.

CDUT is not the first institution of higher learning implicated in a fee-for-rankings scandal.

Gong Ke, the president of Tianjin University said in March that he had refused to pay a rankings organization, China Youth Daily reported.

Just how influential these influential rankings really are is hard to assess.

Chen Yili, vice principal of Beijing New Bridge Foreign Language School, said his high school’s students chose universities at the suggestion of their parents and according to the reputations of the universities.

“We don’t know the source, operation or standards of the rankings,” Chen told the Global Times yesterday. “I suspect their credibility and validity.”

Illustration: Liu Daowei