Tia Loukkola

Director of Institutional Development

November 2015

The impact of leading global rankings

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EUA’s work on rankings in short

• 2009-2010 Council working group

• Two reviews with main focus on ranking methodologies

2011 Global University Rankings and Their Impact

2013 Global University Rankings and Their Impact – Report II

• 2012-2015 RISP project

2014 Rankings in Institutional Strategies and Processes: Impact or Illusion?

• Mapping EUA members’s participation in U-Multirank 2015 Report on the experiences from the first round

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Who looks at the rankings?

• Students

• Policy-makers

• University leaders and academic community

• Different kinds of impact

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System level implications

• Attention paid to universities

• Encourage the collection and publication of reliable national data on HE

• Search for common definitions of indicators

• Unexpected reactions Immigration

Recognition

Scholarships

Partnerships

• Mergers?

Implications at institutional level (1)

• While highly critical of rankings, HEIs still use rankings

– Fill information gap

– Benchmark

– Inform institutional decision-making

– Develop marketing material

Does your institution monitor its position in

rankings?

Monitoring ranking of other/peer institutions

Reasons for monitoring other institutions

• 84% benchmark purposes (compare yourself to other institutions) at national level

• 75% benchmark purposes at international level

• 23% establishing/maintaining national collaborations

• 56% establishing/maintaining international collaborations

• 28% establishing/maintaining staff exchange

• 37% establishing/maintaining student exchange

• 2% other

Implications at institutional level (2)

• Institutional processes affected by rankings fall into 4 categories

– Mechanisms to monitor rankings

– Clarification of institutional profile and adapting core activities

– Improvement to institutional data collection

– Investment in enhancing institutional image

Rankings’ role in institutional strategy

Rankings used for strategic, organisational,

managerial or academic action

Conclusions from RISP

• Institutions need to improve their capacity to generate comprehensive, high-quality data and information:

to underpin strategic planning and decision-making

to provide meaningful, comparative information about institutional performance to the public

• Rankings can be an important ingredient in strategic planning… nevertheless, it is vital that each university stays “true” to its mission and should not be “diverted or mesmerised” by rankings

• The report ends with guidelines on how institutions could use the rankings for strategic purposes

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Conclusions

• Use of rankings at institutional or system level not well thought-through

• Would we need international or European common dataset?

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All publications are available at

http://www.eua.be/Publications.aspx