Understanding University Rankings and the Need for Academic Ranking of Balkan Universities Authors

In a new era of higher education marked by international rivalry, university rankings have grown in significance. Their emergence has been welcomed with a great deal of skepticism, some enthusiasm, and institutional uneasiness. They are frequently contentious and a subject of substantial debate. Ranking systems are unavoidable, thus it is critical to consider how they will affect the higher education […]

Spreading the gospel: Legitimating university rankings as boundary work

The dramatic salience of university rankings is usually attributed to a number of macro-level trends, such as neoliberal ideology, the spread of audit culture, and globalization in the broadest sense. We propose that the institutionalization of university rankings cannot be fully accounted for without a better understanding of the meso-level processes that enable it. To explore these, we zoom in […]

Why Rankings Appear Natural (But Aren’t)

Rankings have dramatically proliferated over the past several decades. An often-overlooked impact of this proliferation is that it has facilitated the institutionalization of an imaginary of the modern world as a stratified order, whose actors are imagined as continuously striving to perform better than others. To better understand this impact, we need to take a closer look at rankings’ premises […]

QS World University Rankings 2024: Top global universities

The 20th edition of the QS World University Rankings features 1,500 institutions across 104 locations and is the only ranking of its kind to emphasise employability and sustainability. This year, we’ve implemented our largest-ever methodological enhancement, introducing three new metrics: Sustainability, Employment Outcomes and International Research Network.  The results draw on the analysis of 17.5m academic papers and the expert opinions […]