A Critical Review on World University Ranking in Terms of Top Four Ranking Systems

Evaluating the higher education productivity of Chinese and European “elite” universities using a meta-frontier approach

“…Data of the investigated universities for this paper were based on the international university ranking known as playing a crucial role in discussing about the role and position of universities in the world’s higher education. The different ranking systems were made to assess the performance of universities over the world (Anowar et al, 2015 ; Gnolek et al, 2014 ). The widely recognized ranking systems—once accepted—are influential to a variety of people, specifically: international students for seeking a right institution for their higher studies; new researchers to carry on scholarly activities and achieve funding facilities; institutions themselves to develop a constructive competition; and also employers to choose appropriate workforce for their business development (Luque-Martínez & Faraoni, 2019 ; Souto-Otero & Enders, 2017 ).…”

“…The widely recognized ranking systems—once accepted—are influential to a variety of people, specifically: international students for seeking a right institution for their higher studies; new researchers to carry on scholarly activities and achieve funding facilities; institutions themselves to develop a constructive competition; and also employers to choose appropriate workforce for their business development (Luque-Martínez & Faraoni, 2019 ; Souto-Otero & Enders, 2017 ). A review by Anowar et al ( 2015 ) indicated the top four widely accepted ranking systems including THE, ARWU, QS and Webometrics Ranking. Anowar et al ( 2015 , p. 559) showed that “(…) none of these ranking systems can provide satisfactory evaluation in terms of their construct validity and other parameters related to disputation.…”

Universities Under Pressure: the Impact of International University Rankings

“…However, the different actors involved in university classifications may not be fully aware of these difficulties, or the complexity of the existing processes and criteria for the development of rankings, even though they show great interest in knowing what position a university is in (Al-Juboori, Su, & Ko, 2012). Each ranking system uses different sources of information, some of which are of questionable transparency (Anowar et al, 2015), and evaluates universities according to its own criteria using indicators that do not cover all the activities that a university can develop, strongly focusing on the institutions' investigations (Ganga-Contreras, Martin, & Viancos, 2019). For example, most ranking systems are based essentially on research activities (Margison, 2014), including indicators such as research productivity, research income or papers published in Nature and Science; leaving aside the other functions of the universities (Figure 1).…”

“…Therefore, the description of universities on the basis of their research activity does not seem to be entirely adequate, but comparisons based on reputation and not on the merits of the action only benefit the institutions that are already leaders in the rankings and fail to promote the improvement of the rest (Margison, 2014). The use of soft data (that is, qualitative data based on opinions, ideas, knowledge, experience) and the weighting systems used can favour some well-known universities in developed countries (Anowar et al, 2015;Olcay & Bulu, 2017).…”

“…As a result, it is impossible for most universities (95%) to meet most of the requirements and criteria of the international rankings. This is made more difficult when they do not cover many areas that are within the mission of a university (Anowar et al, 2015;Pavel, 2015). If a university does not have the mission of being internationally excellent with a high level of research, it cannot be well reflected in the current rankings, and must resign itself to not belonging to the world's top research universities.…”