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University Rankings: Diversity, Excellence and the European Initiative
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Boulton, Geoffrey |
| Copyright Year | 2011 |
| Abstract | International rankings of universities influence the perceptions and priorities of governments, of businesses and students. Rectors and university councils see the achievement of high ranking as a strategic imperative. However, their value and benefit is questionable. The fundamental problems are two-fold: Most seek to capture characteristics that cannot be measured directly, and require indirect proxies. How good are the proxies? Different universities fulfil different roles, which a single monotonic scale cannot capture. How can different roles be compared in meaningful ways? None of the current ranking systems have the validity, rigour or meaning to be of real value, except those based on citations to evaluate research, and even here, they fall short in assessing research in the humanities and the social sciences. Institutions tend to target a high score irrespective of whether the metrics are good proxies for the underlying value of the institution. Rankings will at best be irrelevant to those values or, at worst, undermine them. They encourage convergence towards a research-dominated model, reducing system diversity and undermining the potential to contribute to society in other ways. But rankings have such a hold on the public imagination that they are likely to be permanent features of the landscape. Can they be improved? Two approaches have been funded by the European Commission. U-Map is an attempt at classification describing the diversity of universities by mapping activities, not quality: its purpose being transparency for stakeholders. U-Multirank is an attempt at ranking evaluating quality in dimensions analogous to those of U-Map: its purpose assessing how well universities perform their different roles, rather than holding all to research-dominated criteria. Both have serious defects. They suffer from imprecise proxies and the profound difficulty of finding comparable data between countries. The temptations will be to: require ever more burdensome detail in the hope of penetrating to the heart of the matter, formalise the distinctions that mapping reveals, promote further the idea of the university as merely a source of modular products currently in vogue. LERU applauds the attempt to create U-Map as a description of diversity, but is less enthusiastic about U-Multirank, |
| Starting Page | 74 |
| Ending Page | 82 |
| Page Count | 9 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.03.006 |
| Volume Number | 13 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://librarylearningspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Boulton-2011.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.03.006 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
