New University Ranking from the European Commission

A new university ranking from the European Commission aims at redressing the US and UK dominance of other ranking systems. Martin Ince takes a closer look.

Even the harshest critics of university ranking systems agree on one thing: they are not going to go away. Nor are they going to lose their influence, which is widespread among students and their parents, academics and university managers, politicians and policy makers.

On the contrary, the prospect is that rankings will multiply like iPhone apps, until we reach the point where there is one for every possible purpose.

The new potential addition from the European Commission is likely to be the most political entrant to the field so far. Its driver is the perception that the strong showing of US and UK universities in the QS World University Rankings (formerly known as THE-QS World University Rankings 2004-2009), and other systems such as Shanghai Jiao Tong, overstates the importance of the Anglophone world in academe.

Predicted outcomes

While the development phase of this project has been a long one, the contract to carry it out has now been awarded to a group which includes the people behind the German CHE ranking system, as well as the powerful academic team at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

It is easy to see that this team, called CHERPA-Network, would put in a strong bid. As well as Leiden and CHE, it involves the Centre for Higher Education Policy studies at Twente in the Netherlands, the Catholic University at Leuven in Belgium, and a French social science institute.

It is equally easy to see that this plan contains the seeds of disaster for the Netherlands, home to two of the five organizations involved. The high-quality, outward-looking universities of the Netherlands do well in the QS ranking system - 11 of them were in our top 200 in 2009. Most serious Dutch universities are already highly ranked and they are unlikely to be better placed in this new system.

There is also a political muddle at the heart of this project. Everyone likes a table in which they look good. But the Commission has also spent billions on establishing the European Research Area and the European Research Council, both of which are intended specifically to put European research on the same level as that of the US.

It seems a little strange for Europe to concede defeat by the Anglophone forces at this early stage in the struggle and set up a fresh contest in which it might do better. There will be tension between head office in Brussels, which wants Europe to have universities as good as MIT or Stanford, and CHE and its partners. They will be prone to mission capture from continental universities which want measures that display their regional or local missions to best effect.

Large data resources

As its users around the world know, the QS World University Rankings uses a limited range of criteria, including academic and employer opinion, staff and student numbers, international orientation and publication impact, to look at universities in the round. By contrast, the massive CHE system uses large amounts of data to produce information on specific courses, institutions and locations in Germany and its neighbour countries.

The CHERPA-Network group’s approach is likely to involve immense amounts of very granular data, such as the detailed citations analysis for specific subjects developed at Leiden. Unfortunately for the supporters of this project, that analysis tends to put UK and US universities in the top slots, especially for research.

It is exceptionally difficult to gather consistent data on universities around the world except in a very broad-brush way. If we take literally the Berlin Principles quoted approvingly by CHERPA on its website – that ranking systems ought to take into account the linguistic, cultural, economic and historical contexts in which universities are situated – it would be impossible to produce a world ranking of universities.

Instead, the CHERPA system is likely to turn into a European ranking with a limited amount of Asian and US benchmarking. It will also produce detailed European comparisons of course offerings for specific subjects. Here too, there are signs of muddle at CHERPA.

The first two subjects to be analysed are business and engineering. Business is a complex enough area, but engineering includes dozens of subjects from old favourites like civil and mechanical, all the way to nanotechnology or renewable energy. One early test of CHERPA will be its ability to say something useful about this mass of disparate topics.