Brussels, 13/05/2014 (Agence Europe) - On 13 May, the European Commission gave the go-ahead for the new international higher education ranking system, U-Multirank, which it had announced in December 2012.
The Commission explained that U-Multirank is based on five key criteria and is novel in the sense that it allows for multidimensional rankings based on a much broader range of factors than is currently the case in international rankings. Funded by the European Union to the tune of €2 million, U-Multirank focuses on students who want to compare universities on the basis of different criteria. It provides these students with a personalised ranking according to selected criteria. Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, said: “U-Multirank will enable students to make more informed decisions about where to study, and give us a more accurate picture of how universities perform”. She also underlined the need to highlight the excellence of technical and regional universities that are not included in international rankings. She stated that U-Multirank “highlights many excellent performers that do not show up in the current, research-focused, global rankings - including more than 300 universities that have never appeared in any world ranking until now”.
As opposed to traditional approaches to ranking university performance, most of which focus on research, to the disadvantage of other factors, U-Multirank evaluations are based on five key criteria: (1) research performance; (2) quality of teaching and learning; (3) international orientation; (4) success in knowledge transfer and (5) contribution to regional growth.
Out of the 879 universities that appear in U-Multirank, more than 500 have provided detailed information. Others are being assessed on the basis of information coming from publicly available sources, as well as information provided by 60,000 student members of the universities surveyed.
The ranking assesses universities' overall performance but also ranks them in selected academic fields. In 2014, the fields are business studies, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and physics. In 2015, three other subjects will be added - psychology, computer studies and medicine. The universities are assessed on the basis of around 30 different indicators and rated in 5 performance groups ranging from “A” (very good) to “E” (weak). The results show that although more than 95% of higher education institutions receive an “A” for at least one indicator, only 12% obtain more than 10 top scores, which leads to the conclusion that no university can claim to be a high performer in all areas. On the other hand, many of them perform well in certain specific domains (43% of them obtain an “A” for five criteria and 43% also obtain an “A” for 11 out of 15 criteria).
U-Multirank currently receives a budget of €200 million but will be able to benefit from additional funding for two years (2015-2017). In the future, the list of universities taking part in U-Multirank will be expanded. The second U-Multirank exercise will be published in March 2015 and universities that wish to be included in this new rating can now submit their requests.
The ranking is currently put together by an independent consortium headed by the Centre for Higher Education (CHE) in Germany and the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) in the Netherlands, in partnership with other institutions, but in the long term it is expected to be managed by an independent organisation. For further information: http://www.umultirank.org. (IL)