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

USHER AND MEDOW
WHAT ARE UNIVERSITY RANKINGS AND LEAGUE TABLES?
University rankings are lists of certain groupings of institutions (usually, but not
always, within a single national jurisdiction), comparatively ranked according to a
common set of indicators in descending order. University rankings are usually
presented in the format of a ‘league table’, much as sports teams in a single league
are listed from best to worst according to the number of wins and losses they have
achieved. 2 Like performance indicators, they are made up of a series of individual
indicators which are meant to present a statistical picture about a range of institutional
qualities or activities. The primary differences are that while performance
indicator systems simply present quantitative data on each indicator, league tables
use them to emphasize differences between institutions, and in addition weight
each indicator and then aggregate scores across a number of indicators to come up
with a single ‘best’ institution.
Another notable aspect of league tables is that historically speaking, they have
for the most part been produced by commercial publishing enterprises. In part, this
reflects the fact that rankings share some characteristics with ‘consumer guides’ to
various products. Although rankings are not guides to specific institutions, the
publishers of individual institutional guides may incorporate rankings data as
supplementary material, fleshing out descriptions for the purpose of providing
more information to their readers. Rankings are – at least in theory – meant to be a
way of helping citizens understand what they are getting for their public expenditures
on education, and to help parents and students make informed decisions about
where to spend their private dollars on education. However, as we shall see later,
commercial rankers are increasingly being joined by governments who – in developing
countries at least – seem to be eschewing performance indicator tables for
rankings. Nigeria, Pakistan and Kazakhstan are among the countries where national
governments have begun publishing rankings of their own national universities
(Salmi 2007).
Institutional ranking systems can be conducted either on a national or international
scale. National ranking systems are ones in which all or nearly all of a country’s
universities are measured against one another. This was the original university
ranking format – i.e., the type pioneered by the US News and World Report in 1981
and which has been widely copied in other countries. In most cases, all universities
within a country are compared, although in some cases – notably in Canada
(Maclean’s Magazine) and the United States (US News and World Report) – the
country’s universities are divided up according to certain institutional characteristics
and only compared to other institutions with similar characteristics, in effect
creating a group of mini-league tables. It is rankings of these types that are included in
this report.
Global institutional ranking systems are a new variation on the older idea of
national rankings. There are at present three of these: the Academic Ranking of
World Universities from Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University, first released in 2003,
the World University Rankings from the Times Higher Education Supplement of
Britain (henceforth THES), first released in November 2004, and the Ranking
Iberoamericano rankings which compare universities throughout Latin America,
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