The world‐class league tables and the sustaining of international reputations in higher education

Abstract

The purpose of this exploratory article is to broaden our understanding of institutional reputation. It argues that it is vital to understand how prestigious institutions of higher education evaluate the basis of their own reputations. While accepting the importance of institutional research outputs, which are so critical to the current 'world-class' ranking lists, it puts forward alternative criteria that elite institutions are likely to embrace, and suggests ways in which their significance could be researched. There have been two main academic approaches to the ranking lists: the first explores their methodological weaknesses and suggests ways in which they could be improved; the second offers a moral condemnationthey are invariably poorly constructed, have negative policy connotations and their use should be restricted. This article takes a different approach: we need to know what institutions believe is the basis of their own reputations, and what changes they are prepared to pursue in order to sustain it.

Relationship between measures of academic quality and undergraduate student attrition: the case of higher education institutions in the Colombian Caribbean region

“…The indicator corresponding to the percentage of programs with scores in the Saber Pro test above the national average may point out issues associated with the quality of the teaching and learning, important elements of academic integration that may ultimately affect student retention (Tinto, 1975). The number of research groups, although not included in the Colombian Quality Assurance System, was considered as an indicator of academic quality because of its impact on both the program and the institution's reputation (Arber, Barrere, & Anlló, 2008cited by UNESCO, 2010Tapper & Filippakou, 2009). Currently, there is pressure on Colombian HEI to improve their rankings where research productivity is weighted significantly higher when compared to other institutional characteristics such as the quality of teaching.…”

Ten challenges in modeling bibliographic data for bibliometric analysis

“…Rankings and evaluations are often confused. This may be due to the widespread dissemination of rankings in the field of higher education in recent years [12,39]. The need to have comparable data between institutions belonging to very different university systems has been met by an extensive use of bibliometric indicators in the rankings 4 .…”

Following the leader? Network models of “world-class” universities on Twitter

“…networks composed of institutions that hire PhD graduates from other institutions) are a better measure of academic prestige than output metrics such as publications and citations. Tapper and Filippakoub (2009) also identify that reputation is more complex and nuanced than ranking, and best understood as networks in which "members of a group reinforce each other's status" (62). This has important implications for how highly ranked universities associate with one another, as they explain Prestigious groupings would prefer to remain relatively small and impose strict entry conditions...It is possible that we are witnessing the steady growth of a global network of universities that are assumed to be world-class, and in the future this will be the network that carries the most prestige (Tapper and Filippakoub, 2009:61-2) If true, then one would expect to see a clear relationship between rankings and how institutions associate with one another through social media, which are a highly visible form of prestige, as highly ranked institutions would form partnerships that preserve their elite status.…”