Tia Loukkola Director of Institutional Development November 2015 The impact of leading global rankings
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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