Universities respond to incentives: who knew?

From Inside Higher Education the story of Australian universities hiring people to help them do well in the local version of the U.S. News rankings.

There are, of course, similar people at US universities; their jobs are just better disguised.

The literature on performance management makes clear that if you give bureaucrats an objective function, no matter how misguided, they will optimize relative to it, and with great creativity and enthusiasm.