Migration Governance and University Rankings

Governments, businesses, and knowledge institutions around the world are engaged in a war for talent. According to the "global talent competition" policy script, talents are the highly skilled or highly educated individuals who are able to solve a variety of (policy) problems, ranging from the specific needs of various industries to global challenges. Many governments have developed migration policies to attract and retain foreign talents as part of their overall talent strategy. There are varieties of migration policies targeting foreign talents, ranging from post-study pathways to shortage-based and points-based visas, as well as innovator visas. While each policy sets out its own particular conditions, we observed global university rankings – an instrument developed outside of the migration sector – being increasingly used in recent years to assess if individual applicants are "talents". Our paper examines how global university rankings are used in migration governance in the UK (High Potential Individual visa in 2022), Hong Kong (Top Talent Pass in 2022), and Singapore (Complementarity Assessment Framework, COMPASS, in 2023). Guiding our comparison is the question: What is the relationship between global university rankings and the design of talent migration policies, and how do rankings enforce mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion?