Love them or loathe them, university rankings carry weight. Governments use them to measure quality, families looking for study opportunities continue to look to them for guidance on where to study and they remain a prominent feature of marketing material.
The sheer breadth of rankings can be surprising, from THE, QS, Shanghai Rankings, to the Private University Ranking – ASEAN, Studocu’s World University Ranking, Webometrics, and the Round University Rankings to name but a few.
Rankings providers are looking to adapt to shifts in the market, such as QS’s Graduate Employability Rankings or THE’s Global Employability University Ranking as education upped it focus on employability.
And as sustainability and the environmental crisis has shot up the global agenda, rankings compilers have once again moved.
Writing for The PIE recently, QS CEO Jessica Turner detailed how the newly-launched Sustainability Rankings seeks to “enable students to understand the environmental impact universities are creating”.
Students expect universities to be invested in the same social causes that they are, she said, pointing out that 82% of prospective international students actively seek out information on an institution’s sustainability practices.
The data “can help universities to better understand how they compare to other institutions worldwide across a range of key indicators for environmental and social impact”, Turner said.
UI GreenMetric Ranking of World Universities has ranked sustainability for over a decade, and the non-commercial U-Multirank has measured the HE gender balance and revealed women are “particularly underrepresented” in research intense universities.
More information:
https://thepienews.com/analysis/rankings-and-the-line-of-best-fit-the-ultimate-guide-or-blunt-instrument/?mc_cid=f58c7a190c&mc_eid=ae0736c715