Impacts of Global University Rankings, EUA report.

EUA commissioned this report in response to the growth in international and national rankings, as a result of increasing questions from member institutions requesting information and advice on the nature of these rankings, because of the interest shown by national governments in ranking exercises, and finally in light of the European Commission’s decision to develop a ‘European ranking’.

The report focuses on international rankings and also refers to a number of other ongoing projects seeking to measure university performance. It describes and analyses the methodologies used by the main international rankings using only publically available and freely accessible information.

It is clear that despite their shortcomings, evident biases and flaws, rankings are here to stay. They ‘enjoy a high level of acceptance among stakeholders and the wider public because of their simplicity and consumer type information’ (AUBR Expert Group, 2009). For this reason it is important that universities are aware of the degree to which they are transparent, from a user’s perspective, of the relationship between what it is stated is being measured and what is in fact being measured, how the scores are calculated and what they mean.

However, it is important to underline that international rankings in their present form only cover a very small percentage of the world’s 17,000 universities, between 1% and 3% (200-500 universities),completely ignoring the rest.

The report confirms that most international rankings focus predominantly on indicators related to the research function of universities. Attempts to measure the quality of teaching and learning generally involve the use of proxies, often with a very indirect link to the teaching process, and are rarely effective.

The importance of links to external stakeholders and environments are largely ignored. Where existing data is used, it is often not used consistently, and reputational factors have in many cases disproportional importance. Taken together, this leads to an oversimplified picture of institutional mission, quality and performance, and one that lacks relevance for the large majority of institutions, especially at a time when diversification and individual institutional profiling are high on agendas across Europe.