University Rankings Need Improvement

A different approach to university rankings

Educationalists are well able to find fault with rankings on numerous grounds and may reject them outright. However, given that they are here to stay, we could also try to improve them wherever possible. All currently published university rankings combine various measures to produce an overall score using an additive approach. The individual measures are first normalized to make the figures ‘co...

On the function of university rankings

Global network centrality of university rankings

Universities and higher education institutions form an integral part of the national infrastructure and prestige. As academic research benefits increasingly from international exchange and cooperation, many universities have increased investment in improving and enabling their global connectivity. Yet, the relationship of university performance and its global physical connectedness has not been...

Are university rankings useful to improve research? A systematic review

INTRODUCTION Concerns about reproducibility and impact of research urge improvement initiatives. Current university ranking systems evaluate and compare universities on measures of academic and research performance. Although often useful for marketing purposes, the value of ranking systems when examining quality and outcomes is unclear. The purpose of this study was to evaluate usefulness of ra...

8 Global University Rankings in the Polish Context

University rankings are a topic of controversy and contention in many countries. Poland is no exception. This chapter analyzes aspects of rankings in the Polish context. Poland is a particularly interesting case, since it is a middle-sized coun­ try with a middle-tier higher education system. Among the questions discussed here are: What is the impact of global university rankings on the Polish ...