The Future of University Rankings

Abstract

In analysing the abundant meta-evaluative literature on university rankings, we note an impressive range of arguments and analyses of the concepts, methods, results, perceptions and possible impact of such kinds of activities to put individual institutions somehow ‘on a map’. In various areas of research, we often note that a certain approach draws substantial attention because it is viewed as very ambitious and promising and as deserving further enhancement through the involvement of the brightest scholars in the respective field. In the case of university rankings, however, most experts would agree that the great attention paid to this domain by many experts is not an indication of respect for high quality analysis. Rather, rankings draw attention as a consequence of a seemingly paradoxical mixture of conceptual and methodological weakness on the one hand and political power on the other to influence the views of the ‘map’ of higher education and to elicit activities aimed at changing the existing ‘map’.