2. TRENDS IN RANKINGS
• National rankings officially started in 1982, although
a few previous examples
• US News – then UK, Canada etc
• Massively influential and much criticised
• And then rankings went global
3. GLOBAL RANKINGS
• International rankings – Asiaweek a pioneer – then
Shanghai 2003
• Expansion – now 20+ plus spin offs
• Elaboration -- more universities, new indicators,
• Evolution – complexity, opacity, sophistication, reliability
4. PEAK GLOBALISM?
• Questioning globalism – political and scientific
• Russia abandons 5 top100
• India IITs boycott THE
• China downgrading international research
• Demands for decolonisation
5. LIMITATIONS OF GLOBAL RANKINGS
• Bias to research
• Bias to “harder” sciences
• Bias to the West and the Anglosphere
• Income, reputation and awards
6. MORE CRITICISM
• Not transparent
• Do not measure what matters
• Lacking good governance
• Not rigorous
• An inverse relationship between quality and media
popularity?
7. BIG PROBLEM
• Number of universities?
• 30,000+ Webometrics
• Nearly 90,000 HEIs according to Alex Usher
• Big name rankings rank only a fraction
• Limited value to most students
8. NATIONAL AND REGIONAL
RANKINGS
• Countries and regions have:
• Different values
• Different resources
• Different traditions
• One size does not fit all
9. REGIONAL AND NATIONAL
RANKINGS
• Big name rankers have produced regional rankings for
Asia, Latin America etc
• Modifying or adapting methodology or business models
• THE has produced “teaching” rankings for USA, Europe,
and Japan
• Applied HE in Singapore has produced a ranking of
private ASEAN universities, soon all of Asia
11. NUMBERS
• 59 in 2022 compared to 58 in 2015
• But many countries with a ranking in 2015 had none visible in 2022
• Mainly in Europe,-- eg Latvia, Albania, Romania
• In USA, UK, Brazil, France – number of rankings expanded
12. DISTRIBUTION
• 14 in Western Europe
• 13 North America
• 12 Latin America
• 9 East and Central Europe
• 7 Central and South Asia
• 4 – rest of Asia- Pacific
13. ATTRIBUTES
• Mainly private for-profit
• Emphasis on student satisfaction, employability
• Targets tend to be local students and parents
• Teaching rather than research
• Undergraduate rather than postgraduate programs
• Local engagement rather than internationalisation
14. COMPARING TWO RANKINGS
• US News – America’s Best Colleges
• Weighted towards inputs, reputation, social mobility and social engineering
• Best Chinese Universities
• Weighted towards student ability, student employment, research, links with industry
15. CONCLUDE
• National and regional rankings are expanding in a few
countries
• Others seem to be content with using global rankings
• The audiences, methods, and indicators of all rankings are
likely to change
• National Rankings seem to reflect a growing divergence
in university systems reflecting the disintegration of the
globalised world.
