College Rankings Catch On Overseas

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By BURTON BOLLAG

When a small group of researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in China, started comparing the world's top research universities, their aim was to help China develop world-class institutions of its own. But their annual "Academic Rankings of World Universities," first published in 2003, quickly became a popular international reference.

The ranking is based almost entirely on measures of strength in research. It looks at such indicators as the number of faculty members whose papers are highly cited, and the number of faculty members and alumni who win Nobel Prizes. The result is a list of what Shanghai Jiao Tong says are the world's 500 best institutions.

In 2004 The Times Higher Education Supplement, a British weekly, introduced its annual World University Rankings, which list 200 institutions. Those rankings are based half on the opinions of faculty members and company recruiters, and half on the ratio of full-time academic staff members to students and on how often faculty members' papers are cited.

Although the ranking has not achieved the influence of its Chinese competitor, the two lists have had considerable impact in just a few years, especially outside the United States.

Ellen S. Hazelkorn, dean of the Dublin Institute of Technology's faculty of applied arts, says rankings are playing an increasingly larger role in how major universities — and the government agencies that oversee them — make management and financial decisions.

"There is anecdotal evidence," she says, "that university presidents are being hired and fired in response to rankings."

Last year Ms. Hazelkorn surveyed 202 institutions around the world and found that many had tried to improve their places in national or international rankings. "You see areas [of study] being dropped and other areas being bought together for greater critical mass," she says. "At Irish and British universities, there has been a big push in the last 12 months to hire Nobel Prize laureates."

Getting the Best Value

As tuition is being introduced — or raised — at publicly supported university systems around the world, more people are embracing the idea that rankings can help consumers get the best value.

Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a Washington-based research group, says that in the last few years, national ranking systems have been established in at least 20 countries across the world, and he expects more. Most are compiled by newspapers or magazines. Outside the United States they are typically referred to as "league tables," after the listings of the wins and losses in a sports league.

The systems use varying combinations of measures — including institutions' reputations, research output, resources, students' test scores, graduation rates, and job placement — which lead to quite different results. Academics have criticized all of the rankings, saying they are simplistic and arbitrary.

Although most systems are consistent in their rankings of the top institutions in each country, the lists vary significantly in their ratings of other colleges and universities. For example, the University of Maryland at College Park is ranked 37th by Shanghai, but 111th by The Times Higher Education Supplement. (The difference is not very surprising, since research is Maryland's strength, and the Shanghai rankings focus on research.)

One innovative ranking system is run by the Center for Higher Education Development, in Germany. It rates nearly 250 institutions based on a survey of 130,000 students and 16,000 faculty members. Recently, Austrian and Swiss institutions were added. But instead of assigning each institution a unique place in a rankings list, it divides them into three tiers and rates their performance in a number of disciplines and issues, such as teaching and international focus. The results are presented on an interactive Web site.

The Web site "allows consumers to order institutions on the basis of the issues they think are important," says Marijk van der Wende, a professor of comparative higher-education-policy studies at the Free University of Amsterdam. She says many higher-education researchers consider that the best approach, and adds that the European Union is financing a project to examine the feasibility of promoting such a system throughout Europe.