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

REPUTATION INDICATORS IN RANKINGS OF HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS
this aspect we use the example of two German rankings using reputation indicators
but within different groups. The CHE ranking gives information on the reputation
among professors of an academic field (cf. Müller-Böling and Federkeil 2007), a
ranking published by the magazine Karriere (Career) asked about the reputation
among a sample of the biggest 1,000 German employers. Both rankings refer to the
reputation in business education programmes with regard to education and training.
If we compare the results of both studies we see that reputational hierarchy of both
groups is very similar with regard to German public universities. But whereas employers
ascribe a high reputation to some small private business schools, those
business schools have almost no reputation at all among German professors of
business education. This example illustrates that different groups can have different
opinions on reputation of universities due to different rationales: Whereas employers
probably have a priority on issues of ‘employability’, this does not have much
priority for professors who rather think of research or academic quality when taking
reputation into consideration.
Reputation by Academic Disciplines
Most rankings (such as THES World Rankings, U.S. News) report about reputation
of universities as a whole. Clearly there is some understanding of the reputation of
universities as a whole – everyone thinks of Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge when
thinking of the world’s top universities. But reputation can be very different for
different academic fields and most users of rankings are interested in one particular
subject – students who want to find a university for a programme as well as
researchers who want to inform about the universities in their field.
To give an example with data from the CHE ranking: The field-specific reputation
indicators in the CHE ranking are based on a survey among all professors of a
field. Professors are asked to list up to five universities they believe to be the leading
universities in their field (except their own) – separately for research and for studying
a degree programme (cf. Berghoff et al. 2006). The indicator gives the percentage
of votes of a university. The reputation, e.g., of Humboldt University in Berlin,
is quite different in different academic fields included in the ranking. Evidence shows
big differences between reputation scores of different departments. The range with
regard to reputation in research varies from three per cent to more than 30 per cent.
Whereas computer sciences and chemistry at Humboldt University have almost no
reputation at all among German professors of those fields, the Medical and the
History Departments belong to the faculties with the highest reputation in Germany.
Those numbers indicate that the reputation does not only differ between broad
fields (like sciences and humanities) but even within broad fields between single
disciplines (e.g. English and Romance languages or Mathematics vs. computer
sciences).
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