Tuesday

19th Mar 2024

EU to test new university ranking in 2010

  • US universities are doing far better in existing rankings than European ones (Photo: Helena Spongenberg)

The European Union is developing a new worldwide ranking system of universities to rival currently established league tables in a bid to improve the ranking of European universities and improve Europe's economic power.

National league tables have been common since the 1990s but as higher education has increasingly become globalised with many students opting to take part of their studies abroad, the focus has shifted to worldwide university rankings.

Read and decide

Join EUobserver today

Get the EU news that really matters

Instant access to all articles — and 20 years of archives. 14-day free trial.

... or subscribe as a group

This means the rankings are increasingly receiving more attention for different specific purposes: Students use them to short-list their choice of university; public and private institutions use them to decide on funding allocations; universities use them to promote themselves; while some politicians use them as a measure of national economic achievements or aspirations.

Europe's around 4,000 higher education institutions have over 19 million students and 1.5 million staff. However, European universities have time and again failed to make it big in the current world university rankings.

The upcoming European league table

The European ranking project will be developed over a two-year period with planned implementation at the beginning of 2011.

Earlier this year, a German/Dutch/Belgian/French consortium for Higher Education and Research Performance Assessment – called CHERPA – won an EU call for tender to develop and test an alternative design for a global ranking of universities.

While planning has been taking place throughout the second half of 2009, the European league table will be tested on 150 higher education institutions around the world in the first half of 2010, initially focussing on engineering and business studies. The project has a budget of €1.1 million.

Although the number of ranking tables increase every year, there are at the moment two main – and rivalling – world university rankings: the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES, also known until the end of last year as THE-QS) in the UK and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Academic Ranking of World Universities (SJTU) in China.

Both rankings have been compiled annually since the mid-2000s and generally show US universities to be well ahead of continental European universities when it comes to the top spots.

In the past six Jiao Tong rankings, 17 US universities were each year placed in the top 20, with Cambridge and Oxford Universities the only European higher education institutions among the top 20. Over the same period, the THES league table generally has 12 US institutions in the top 20 together with four UK universities and occasionally a French institution.

Europe criticises global rankings

The European Commission as well as some EU member states have been criticising the way the established rankings have been compiled, saying that they "contain many biases" and that they fail to "represent the diverse and multifunctional nature of universities and their research activities accurately."

"The commission is of the opinion that many existing rankings do not really fulfil this purpose, for example because they focus on research aspects rather than teaching, and on entire institutions rather than programmes and departments," the Commission stated when calling for a European alternative to the current global league tables.

The call came after a 2008 Commission study questioned the substance of statistics on which the Jiao Tong ranking is based and concluded that neither the Jiao Tong nor the THES system succeed in effectively ranking Europe's universities.

France has long called for a European alternative to current global league tables, arguing that the selection criteria of existing rankings favour Anglo-Saxon higher education institutions to the disadvantage of French and other European universities. French Minister for Higher Education and Research Valérie Pécresse has made a new European rankings system one of her priorities.

According to the EU Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, Maros Sefcovic, the European ranking project's so-called "multi-dimensional" approach to the mapping of universities would create "a better balance between research indicators and quality of education indicators when it comes to the ranking of universities."

The battle for brainpower

The aim to draw up an EU university ranking system forms part of a broader modernisation agenda, which seeks to improve higher education across Europe as part of an overall economic growth strategy.

In the global market, universities have become "a barometer of global competition measuring the knowledge-producing and talent-catching capacity of higher education institutions," argues Ellen Hazelkorn from the Dublin Institute of Technology.

"Knowledge has become the foundation of economic, social and political power," where "the ‘scramble for students' … or ‘battle for brainpower' now complements traditional geo-political struggles for natural resources," she adds.

Analysis

Five years of EU gender policy — hits and misses

On International Women's Day, EUobserver took a closer look at the last five years of gender policy — has the EU been ambitious enough in achieving equality? What were the main hits and misses? And where needs more work?

EU agrees rules to ban products made with forced labour

The new rules will allow authorities to ban a product from the single market if it is found to have been made using forced labour, regardless of whether it is imported into the EU or manufactured within the bloc.

'Outdated' rules bar MEP from entering plenary with child

During a plenary session in Strasbourg, an MEP was denied access to the chamber because he was carrying his young child, due to unforeseen circumstances. The episode shows parliament's rules need to be updated, several MEPs told EUobserver.

Opinion

Gaza is also a war on women: where are European feminists?

Despite last month's provisional ruling by the International Court of Justice instructing Israel to stop a "plausible genocide" in Gaza, references to the terrible plight of women and girls in Gaza have been few and far between, writes Shada Islam.

Opinion

The six-hour U-turn that saw the EU vote for austerity

The EU's own analysis has made it clear this is economic self-sabotage, and it's politically foolish three months from European elections where the far-right are predicted to increase support, writes the general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation.

Latest News

  1. Borrell: 'Israel provoking famine', urges more aid access
  2. Europol: Israel-Gaza galvanising Jihadist recruitment in Europe
  3. EU to agree Israeli-settler blacklist, Borrell says
  4. EU ministers keen to use Russian profits for Ukraine ammo
  5. Call to change EIB defence spending rules hits scepticism
  6. Potential legal avenues to prosecute Navalny's killers
  7. EU summit, Gaza, Ukraine, reforms in focus this WEEK
  8. The present and future dystopia of political micro-targeting ads

Stakeholders' Highlights

  1. Nordic Council of MinistersJoin the Nordic Food Systems Takeover at COP28
  2. Nordic Council of MinistersHow women and men are affected differently by climate policy
  3. Nordic Council of MinistersArtist Jessie Kleemann at Nordic pavilion during UN climate summit COP28
  4. Nordic Council of MinistersCOP28: Gathering Nordic and global experts to put food and health on the agenda
  5. Friedrich Naumann FoundationPoems of Liberty – Call for Submission “Human Rights in Inhume War”: 250€ honorary fee for selected poems
  6. World BankWorld Bank report: How to create a future where the rewards of technology benefit all levels of society?

Stakeholders' Highlights

  1. Georgia Ministry of Foreign AffairsThis autumn Europalia arts festival is all about GEORGIA!
  2. UNOPSFostering health system resilience in fragile and conflict-affected countries
  3. European Citizen's InitiativeThe European Commission launches the ‘ImagineEU’ competition for secondary school students in the EU.
  4. Nordic Council of MinistersThe Nordic Region is stepping up its efforts to reduce food waste
  5. UNOPSUNOPS begins works under EU-funded project to repair schools in Ukraine
  6. Georgia Ministry of Foreign AffairsGeorgia effectively prevents sanctions evasion against Russia – confirm EU, UK, USA

Join EUobserver

EU news that matters

Join us