World rankings of universities: aims and quality.

Abstract

In all areas of education and research has coming up the trend to elaborate rankings evaluating and comparing the quality of institutions and systems. Also in the area of universities has growing, in the last decade, the number of world and national ranking due to: a) the globalization of the competition between universities within the context of a globalised knowledge economy; b) the increasing demand for comparable information from the ‘clients” (for instance: students and their families); c) the increasing demand from part of the governments and the society of a mayor responsibility of the university in front of the society, which conduced to mayor quality demand of the universities’ services to society. This article presents the results of the Internet search for rankings and their methodological backgrounds. The objectives are a) to present different rankings; b) to analyse their objectives and methodology and c) to provide a constructive but critical view on them. This is the first of two articles about university rankings. This one focused only on international rankings, whereas the second will be about the rankings of Spanish universities. In the core of this article stands the presentation of 10 international rankings in the format of fiches in order to facilitate summarized information to the lector. The fiches are divided in 4 parts: objective, methodology, presentation and comments. In the final chapter, we will compare the different rankings and discuss their validity taking into account articles on this issue freely available in Internet. The article underpins the relevance of rankings as instruments of global education and science policies bring in a critical vision admitting, however, that rankings could fulfil a important function in the improvement of the universities’ performance when they announced well: the objective of the ranking, the type of universities to which they refer, the concrete area of the evaluation, the used methodologies and when they permit really to face improvements in the universities at the level of faculties and departments.