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

USHER AND MEDOW
RANKINGS WITHOUT LEAGUE TABLES: THE CHE APPROACH
For most of this chapter we have been describing league tables – that is, ranking
systems that provide a single integrated score that allows an ordinal ranking of
entire institutions. However, this is not the only possible approach to university
rankings. There is, for instance, no intrinsic reason why indicators must focus
solely on institutions; approaches which look at institutions at lower administrative
levels (such as departments or faculties) are also possible. As we noted earlier, this
is the approach taken by the Guardian, la Repubblica and the two Dutch rankings.
These systems provide comprehensive departmental-level rankings across entire
universities (that is to say, they provide separate rankings for each discipline).
A different approach altogether has been taken by the Centre for Higher Education
Development (CHE) in Germany which issues annual rankings jointly with a media
partner (currently Die Zeit, formerly Stern). The CHE has also been responsible for
producing the SwissUp rankings in Switzerland, and its approach has been copied
in North America by the University Navigator.
There are five significant features to the CHE approach to rankings. The first is
that rankings are done at a sub-institutional (i.e. field of study) level (although the
University Navigator differs from the others in this respect as it is done at an institutional
level). The second is that no weights are attached to any of the indicators.
The third is that absolute scores are not given in any of the indicators: institutions
are grouped roughly into the thirds, and displayed as being in the top, middle, or
bottom tiers. The fourth is that the indicators are not aggregated to create an overall
‘score’. As a result, no institution is declared ‘best’; the indicators of results are
merely displayed. Fifth, the results are online and users of the rankings may in
effect created their own rankings by selecting the indicators which are of interest to
them and then receiving personalized results based on their choices.
It should be noted that not all of these five features are unique to CHE-style
rankings. The first two features, for instance, are shared by The guardian, La Repubblica,
Elsevier and the Keuzegids Hoger Onderwijs. Putting rankings online
and making them susceptible to manipulation is not unique to these three rankings,
either: in Canada, Maclean’s has begun to allow readers to re-jig the rankings on
their own on their online portal, though the main magazine still adheres to its old
format of weighting and aggregating indicators.
While none of these individual factors is necessarily a radical departure from established
practice in rankings, taken together, they do constitute a fairly radical
departure in the concept of rankings. While they are certainly ‘rankings’ in the
broad sense, they are not ‘league tables’ because they do not declare one institution
as better than another on the basis of aggregate scores. CHE avoids this precisely
because it believes that it is at best meaningless (and at worst actively misleading)
to combine widely disparate indicators into a single overall hierarchy.
This stance presents certain difficulties in presenting data in a printed format.
Instead of a simple ordinal rank, all indicators must be shown for all institutions,
which means that they are somewhat unwieldy and difficult to read. On the other
hand, this stance has an enormous advantage when translated to the World Wide
Web, where it is possible for users themselves to in effect create their own weightings
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