University rankers are the subject of much criticism, and yet they remain influential in the field of higher education. Drawing from a two-year field study of university ranking organizations, interviews with key correspondents in the sector, and an analysis of related documents, I introduce the concept of weak expertise. This kind of expertise is the result of a constantly negotiated balance between the relevance, reliability, and robustness of rankers' data and their relationships with their key readers and audiences. Building this expertise entails collecting robust data, presenting it in ways that are relevant to audiences, and engaging with critics. I show how one ranking organization, the Times Higher Education (THE), sought to maintain its legitimacy in the face of opposition from important stakeholders and how it sought to introduce a new "Innovation and Impact" ranking. The paper analyzes the strategies, methods, and particular practices that university rankers undertake to legitimate their knowledge-and is the first work to do so using insights gathered alongside the operations of one of the ranking agencies as well as from the rankings' conference circuit. Rather than assuming that all of these trust-building mechanisms have solidified the hold of the THE over its audience, they can be seen as signs of a constant struggle for influence over a skeptical audience.

Global university rankings set into motion policy responses that highlight and question our understanding of how policies coordinate policy communities. Rankings are often treated merely as accelerators of reform processes and are not explored sufficiently as diverse organizations consisting of different actors and practices. Their role ought not to be so easily generalized; we suggest instead to study encounters between rankers and national policy contexts as occasions of potential tension. Rankings do not just accelerate existing national policy directions-they can change the policy processes themselves. We draw on two multi-year field studies of India and Denmark to investigate how national reforms and developments within the ranking industry interact in often surprising ways. Rankings do not always do what policy makers expect. We (1) highlight the activity of rankers in these two countries, (2) show the dynamic nature of policy processes, and (3) consider the search for policy reference points among the different actors. We present rankers in motion, policies in motion, and finally the complex nature of the ranking device that needs to be both a relevant and malleable policy instrument but also a fixed and legitimate standard. We extend existing arguments about the role of rankings in policy making by showing concretely how rankings are employed in and shape countries' quests for positioning in the global knowledge economy. Rankings demand new explorations of their production and open up a space for new understandings of the links between policy assemblages and wider processes of transformation.

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A large number of Chinese applicants use education agents to apply for overseas programmes. This research investigates agents’ practices with in-service Chinese applicants to UK universities in the context of information asymmetry. COVID-19 pandemic has generated severe challenges for the international higher education sector and on Chinese applicants’ plans to study overseas.This study reports on the findings from in-depth interviews with 16 Chinese agent consultants undertaken in nine cities across China in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic (May 2020). The findings indicate that education agents attempt to mitigate the information asymmetry and emotionally reassure applicants through a four-step information management process. Our contribution generates a new understanding of the role that education agents play in international students’ applications and mobility, voices that are often ignored but essential for international students’ decision-making processes and existing university recruitment services.

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