Universities worldwide will one day be compared on what their graduates learn and will “compete for superior approaches to teaching”, just as schools do thanks to the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) tests.

That is the firm view of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s director of education and skills, Andreas Schleicher, who says its Pisa ranking of school systems is now seen as hugely important around the globe, despite initial fierce opposition from governments. Schleicher, whom former UK education secretary Michael Gove once called “the most important man in the British education system” owing to Pisa’s clout, spoke to Times Higher Education on a visit to London to deliver the Higher Education Policy Institute’s annual lecture last December.

The lecture attempted to revive interest in the principles behind the OECD’s Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (Ahelo) plan for international graduate tests. Ahelo went through a lengthy feasibility study, but failed to win backing from OECD member nations to proceed to the next stage. “There’s been a lot of attention to measuring the success of universities by research output,” Schleicher told THE. “But at the end of the day, students pay high fees. I think we owe them a fair assessment of what they get in return for that.”

Describing teaching quality “proxies” as a poor alternative to “what is it that students actually learn”, Schleicher suggests that “if it’s not the OECD doing it, someone else will”.

On the subject of Pisa, he asks: “Can you imagine a time when we didn’t have any comparative evidence on the skills of young people in school? We take it for granted. I think we will live through that time when we see the same thing in higher education.”

On Ahelo, Schleicher says the “opposition is clearly coming from those institutions that have most to lose, in part from the countries that have most to lose. But anti-competitive behaviour has never been a recipe for long-term success.”

A system of measuring learning outcomes has the potential to disrupt established hierarchies in higher education, argues Schleicher. While at the moment, newer universities “like in East Asia” find it harder to show their worth, he adds, “they will probably win from any comparisons. And they are very keen proponents of this. They are desperately looking for a level playing field.”

Schleicher recalls he had been at meetings of education ministers prior to Pisa where all had maintained they had “the best” school systems in the world. “There was no dialogue across countries,” he reminisces.

However, after Pisa there is a “global dialogue and discourse”, Schleicher says, highlighting the way schools in England are hosting teachers from Shanghai in an attempt to emulate the city’s success in maths education. “My hope is these kinds of metrics could create something similar in the field of higher education. That we do not just compete for graduates, but we compete for superior approaches to teaching and learning.”

(Excerpted and adapted from )