Have we reached peak ranking?
THE is downsizing, other rankings are delayed or closing
Global university rankings began in 2003 with the launch of the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, aiming to assess the progress of Chinese universities in catching up with their Western counterparts. A year later, Times Higher Education Supplement, then a weekly newspaper, teamed with QS Quacquarelli Symonds, a company that helped students gain admission to business schools, to publish the World University Rankings. In the same year, the Spanish National Research Centre initiated the Ranking Web of Universities, more commonly known as the Webometrics Rankings.
The modal year for ranking was 2010, with the debut of five new global rankings: SCImago from Spain, University Ranking of Academic Performance (URAP) from Turkiye, Emerging, a ranking derived from an employer reputation survey, Round University Rankings, then based in Russia, and UI GreenMetric, a sustainability ranking that preceded THE’s Impact Rankings by nearly a decade.
For a while, rankings were ubiquitous, providing publicity aimed at students, fueling media discourse about excellence, serving as tools for appointments and promotions, and influencing the distribution of research funds. However, they may have reached their peak. Rising international tensions have eroded relations among China, Russia, and the West, affecting the mobility of students, faculty, and researchers. There has been widespread discontent with international rankings in South Korea, India, and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, in the United States, there has been great controversy over universities refusing to submit data to the US News rankings.
It appears that ranking isn’t as profitable as it once was. There are rumours that the big rankers, especially THE, have overstretched themselves and are looking for ways to cut costs or develop new products.
In the last few years, several global rankings have been discontinued:
2019; Reuters Top 100 World’s Most Innovative Universities
2019; the mainly Kazakhstan-based Academic Ranking by Academics for Academics (A3 Ranking), probably my favourite ranking because it claimed a budget of ten dollars, which apparently only appeared once
2020; Universitas 21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems
2022; U-Multirank, which is scheduled to be included in the European Higher Education Sector Observatory
There are other signs of strain. The website of the Ranking Web of Universities has been shut down, although the rankings will still be available for a modest fee. Last year, URAP was delayed for a few months. In 2023, the US News Best Global Universities skipped a year, presumably because everybody was caught up in the controversies over the US professional schools ranking.
THE has announced that it will be simplifying its rankings collection. The Sub-Saharan Africa University Rankings, the Young University Rankings, and the Online Learning Rankings will be discontinued. The regional Asian, Arab, and Latin American University Rankings will continue but will now use the same data and indicators as the world rankings.
THE have also stated that the separate Arab academic survey will end and that they will use the world survey for the Arab rankings. Additionally, they will no longer publish standalone reputation rankings. This follows the alleged discovery of voting syndicates in recent reputation surveys.
Back in 2022, THE ‘s partnership with the Wall Street Journal to produce US college rankings came to an end. The Europe teaching ranking was published in 2018 and 2019 but not since then.
THE justifies such changes by claiming that it only wants to make things clear and simple for its consumers.
“The process of simplification that we aim to undertake will not diminish our commitment to providing data in the right context to suit the diversity of needs. Rather, it will offer our wide range of users clarity and simplicity, will enable us to refocus on our core and deeply trusted rankings, and will make our humble contribution to calming the increasing noise and confusion in the wider, global rankings space, much of it beyond our control.”
Cynics might wonder about THE’s humility and suspect that the real reason for the cutbacks might be financial, particularly the growing cost of administering of a vast empire of consultancies, benchmarkings, data curation, processsing , and distribution.
THE have also introduced a bunch of changes to its Impact Rankings. Among them is the introduction of AI to validate data. Maybe I’m overreacting, but that makes me very nervous.
In the coming months and years, we can expect more rankings to go under. I have a horrible feeling that it will be the good ones. We may even end up in a world where THE does all the rankings outside China and Russia.