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

FEDERKEIL
The relationship between reputation and knowledge about institutions is particularly
evident in international contexts. The most prominent example of a ranking
using reputation as an indictor for international comparison is the THES World
Ranking. The THES ranking on the one hand asked a sample of academics
throughout the world about the leading universities; they should state for which
field and which region they feel competent. On the other hand it refers to an international
survey conducted among recruiters. Unfortunately, in both cases there is
no information about the exact return rates 2 and the sample structure of both the
surveys – neither in terms of disciplines nor in terms of countries/regions of the
world. So there is no possibility to make a more detailed analysis by fields and
regions with the THES ranking data.
Data from the CHE ranking, which started to internationalize in 2004 by including
the universities of Austria and Switzerland, can illustrate the problems related to
reputation indicators in international rankings. Since then the sample for the reputation
survey includes professors from Germany, Austria and Switzerland; they
were asked about the leading universities (up to five) in the three countries. Hence
a comparison of reputational hierarchies among professors in these three countries
is possible. Our example compares the reputation of German and Swiss universities
in physics among German and Swiss professors (cf. figure 1). We see that German
and Swiss professors pretty much agree about the reputation of German universities.
But whereas there is a clear and graded hierarchy of Swiss universities among
Swiss professors, the Swiss physics departments have – with the only exception of
the ETH Zürich – almost no reputation at all among German professors.
So there is clear evidence that an international – or even global – reputational
ranking of universities is heavily dependent on the sample included in the survey in
terms of regions/nationalities. Referring to Bourdieu’s idea that reputation as social
capital is linked to networks being continuously reproduced, we see that such networks
notwithstanding processes of globalisation still have a spatial/regional
dimension.
REPUTATION AND LEAGUE TABLE APPROACHES
In most rankings, reputation indicators – as well as a total score for the institution/
department – are transformed into a league table with clear-cut ordinal positions.
Evidence from the CHE ranking and other rankings suggest that the distribution of
reputation, which is usually expressed as a percentage of votings, is extremely
uneven: Very few institutions make up for a very big percentage of votings.
Accordingly the numerical differences of reputation scores among the lower
ranked institutions are rather small.
26