University Rankings, Diversity, and the New ... - Sense Publishers

INTRODUCTION
data. Many ranking use data collected for other purposes in their analyses, without
checking such data for validity and reliability. Furthermore, although not all rankings
prioritise among indicators, most of them do. However, these weightings seem
to be a rather subjective process. Although a given reader is informed about the
fact that certain indicators count more than others, the reason for the same and the
technicalities associated with the actual weight given is, in most cases, not disclosed.
A final area for concern relating to the epistemic dimension of rankings is the
assumption that knowledge can be deconstructed, quantified and summarised in
overall scores. While writers on higher education for a long time have argued that
the knowledge created in universities is contextual, integrated, and culturally
embedded (see e.g. Clark 1983), rankings treat knowledge almost as an externality
of the university.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
Based on the introduction so far, it is perhaps not surprising that this book is
divided into two parts. The first part takes the latter issue of the epistemic nature
and basis of rankings one step further, investigating and analysing how different
rankings work, how they reach their conclusions, and on what data and methodology
they are built. The second part picks up our invitation to start a critical reflection
about the impact of rankings on higher education, how and in what way rankings
influence policy-making, the structure of the sector or the internal life of the sector.
A modern standard reference to ranking systems and their characteristics has
been the survey done by Alex Usher and Massimo Savino in 2006, in which they
conducted a large-scale comparison of a number of ranking systems all around the
world. In this book, Alex Usher has joined up with Jon Medow to update their
previous survey. Compared to their 2006 version, nine more rankings are added,
and changes in methodology in some of the ones surveyed in 2006 are also taken
into account. As such, the new survey provides an impressing overview of central
characteristics of ranking systems, although a key message by the authors actually
is that diversity rather than uniformity still dominates the different rankings. However,
the puzzle for the authors is that despite this diversity, how is it that some
familiar universities such as Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford and Oxford always
dominate the top places of different rankings? Although they are not able to arrive
at a decisive answer, they do point out that ‘age’, ‘faculty size’ and ‘per-student
expenditure’, are factors that are likely suspects in explaining why some institutions
always come on top. Following from this, the chapter concludes by arguing
that the future of rankings probably lies in the growing amount of information from
institutional sources, which may further increase the number and types of rankings
available. Usher and Medow discuss whether this development to some extent
may contribute to ‘democratise’ rankings in that more power is transferred to the
consumer and the user of rankings.
Interestingly, one could argue that consumer or user power is already taken into
account in some of the rankings published by the weight given to the views by
academics and students on the quality of various higher education providers. Hence,
in other sectors of society, targeting the consumers or users of a given service
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