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 […]

U.S. News’ 2024 college ranking boosts public universities

U.S. News & World Report’s 2024 college rankings features many of the usual prestigious institutions at the top of the list, but also vaults some schools much higher after the publisher revised its grading system to reward different criteria. U.S News’ ranking algorithm now based more than 50% of an institution’s score on what it describes as “success in enrolling […]

The ranking of the best universities in the world U.S. News

Us news U.S. News – the authoritative compiler of the rankings of universities in the world. The purpose of the international ranking Best Global Universities – to give entrants in the bachelor and master degree from foreign universities, information about their research and academic reputation. In the ranking of 2016 entered 1000 institutions from 65 countries. The website presents the top […]

Insights from the 2024 Times Higher Education World University Rankings

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2024 include 1,904 universities across 108 countries and regions. The table is based on our new WUR 3.0 methodology, which includes 18 carefully calibrated performance indicators that measure an institution’s performance across five areas: teaching, research environment, research quality, industry, and international outlook. This year’s ranking analysed more than 134 million citations across 16.5 million research […]

The institutionalization of rankings in higher education: continuities, interdependencies, engagement

In this article, we introduce the special issue of Higher Education that centers on the question of the institutionalization of rankings in higher education. The article has three parts. In the first part, we argue that the grand narratives such as globalization and neoliberalism are unsatisfactory as standalone explanations of why and how college and university rankings become institutionalized. As a remedy, […]