Global university rankings have portrayed European higher education institutions in varying lights, leading to intense reflection on the figures on the EU and national levels alike. The rankings have helped to construct a policy problem of ‘European higher education’, framing higher education as an element of competitiveness in a global economy. This has also allowed the European Commission to become a key policy actor in higher education that was not traditionally within its mandate. The global university rankings can be seen as a transnational policy discourse that has different variants at a national level, owing to the historical narratives and public values of each state. But the policy prescriptions of the rankings are taking surprisingly similar forms in different countries and have informed reform agendas throughout Europe. At a general level, the rankings are contributing to a convergence in higher education policies in Europe. This also has negative effects and unintended consequences as the rankings are driving for stratification, homogenisation and commodification of European higher education. But the actual effects of the rankings are mostly indirect and contextual. Hence, the European countries are unequally affected by the rankings, owing to their institutional traditions, size and position in a centre‐periphery axis.
This article examines the intensification, since the creation of the so‐called Shanghai list of world universities in June 2003, of a political struggle in which a variety of actors, universities, national governments, and, more recently, supranational institutions have sought to define global higher education. This competition over global higher education has highlighted issues such as the internationalization and denationalization of higher education, the international mobility of students, the role of English language as the language of science, and the privatization of higher education. In contrast to IPE or Marxist analyses, we analyze the symbolic logic of ranking lists in higher education, their uses, and the European Commission’s initiative to create an alternative world university classification (see World Social Science Report, UNESCO Publishing; Europa zwischen Fiktion und Realpolitik/L’Europe—Fictions et réalités politiques, Transcript for analysis). This initiative represents a political move in a process of rapid restructuration of higher education at the global level.
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