(15 December 2016) Governments and institutions should ignore leading international university rankings because they are “unreliable” and “methodologically flawed”, according to a new analysis by the United Kingdom higher education think tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute or HEPI.
But ranking organisations say that while they accept their processes can be improved, and they are constantly investing to achieve that, students and governments find their data useful.
Global rankings of universities, such as the Times Higher Education or THE World University Rankings, the QS World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities, claim to identify the ‘best’ universities in the world and then list them in rank order, and they are enormously influential, as universities and even governments alter their policies to improve their position, the HEPI report said.
But HEPI’s new research shows the data that league tables use are “unreliable and sometimes worse”, and it is “unwise and undesirable to give the league tables so much weight”.
University World News has the detailed story by Brendan O’Malley
