Brussels, 23/06/2011 (Agence Europe) - University rankings lack transparency and are misleading for students who consult them, as well universities. The latter attempt to improve their rankings by investing in secondary activities to the detriment of their core missions, which are teaching and learning. This warning was made by the European University Association (EUA) in a new study, “Global university ranking and their impact”, which dissects 13 of the most well known league tables.
International university rankings, such as Shanghai, Times Higher Education (THE), QS, are increasing significantly and enjoy a certain success amongst the public. Consequently, it is difficult for university rectors not to be influenced, despite the obvious shortcomings in the different rankings. To cite a report by the European Commission, the international rankings “enjoy a high level of acceptance among stakeholders and the wider public because of their simplicity and consumer type information”. These rankings provide an “oversimplified overview” of the universities' core mission, their qualities and performance, by focusing on indicators related to their research functions, regrets the EUA. The latter also criticises the criteria selected for measuring performance. The Shanghai ranking therefore does not evaluate learning perspective but only the number of Nobel Prize winners there are among the teaching staff. The EUA underlines that “it is vital for universities and different stakeholders to be aware of the degree to which rankings are transparent, and from a user's perspective, of the relationship between what it is stated is being measured and what is in fact being measured, how the scores are calculated and, even more importantly what they mean”. Another criticism highlighted is that international rankings only take a limited percentage into account and ultimately are under-representative of the universities - which are generally large institutions based on research - and only represent between 1% and 3% (200-500 universities ) of the 17,000 universities in the world. European initiatives such as the “U-multirank” have recently been launched in an effort to expand the current criteria and take into consideration all the different objectives of universities, as well as comparative international data that is lacking and without which it is difficult to establish a reliable ranking, concludes the EUA. (I.L./transl.fl)