Rankings of higher education institutions (HEIs) can serve two main purposes:
- The need for consumer guidance among the student population
- They can also serve as a part of the framework for national assessment, accountability and quality assurance in the HEI system.
Another positive effect of the ranking lists is that they generate a debate that contributes to the definition of “quality” in HEIs.
Ranking has also been criticized for a simplistic approach to evaluation. The critics claim among other things that the publishers of ranking lists have applied metaphors from the world of sports with “league tables” that are not applicable to the complex system of higher education and research.
The data for the lists are usually collected in one or more of three different ways:
- Surveys/questionnaires to different groups of stakeholders
- Internal data from the HEIs themselves
- Objective data from third parties (national statistics, publication/citation data from Web of Science (ISI) etc)
The data collection usually revolves around a set of indicators that the publishers of the list have chosen. In most cases the different indicators are assigned a specific weight and then combined to one score. Global listings tend to rely more heavily on bibliometrics – analysis of publication and citation data - than the national exercises. In the national context other reliable and comparable data sources usually are available.
In response to the growing consumer demand and also to the growing criticism of the existing exercises in HEI ranking UNESCO initiated the International Ranking Expert Group (IREG) in 2004. IREG has produced a document containing principles of quality and good practice in HEI ranking - the Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions. These principles can also be used by representatives for HEIs for evaluating the quality of a particular ranking list.
Some ranking lists use the HEIs presence on the web as a major indicator, special emphasis is placed on the full text repositories, Open Access etc..