Contact Us

System re-engineering and institutional rebranding for building a world class university:

The term ‘World Class University’ (or WCU) has been with us for less than a decade and yet it has become a pivotal paradigm in the discourse on university education. Universities worldwide have always striven to belong to a unique ‘universe’ – that special space, operational modalities, appropriate facilities, global outreach and collegiate atmosphere that is most conducive for the pursuit of its triple mandate of:

Universities have also always striven to be the best among equals. However, the advent of the Knowledge Economy and its emphasis on such values as ‘cutting edge’ (in terms of ideas, innovations, facilities, and most importantly, technology) and ‘global competitiveness’ has influenced the academic ambition of universities in a ‘sky-is-no-longer-the-limit ‘ direction. Thus, instead of the conventional stance of seeking to be the best among equals, the academic ambition has become propelled by a desire to be better than the best.

At the same time, there is the external social and economic push for people to seek education in the most competitive institutions for eventual competitive chances in an ever competitive world. Internally, universities are busy ranking themselves against peer institutions, and externally, the clientele of the universities is busy pitching one institution against all others in terms how it fits into global competitive universe.

This is the context in which the first attempts to rank universities in 2003 (and subsequent annual rankings) have hit both institutions and the wider society with a bang. Nations have been jolted by these rankings, which have become an annual event coming in different shapes and forms. France, for example, is reported to. Have begun developing ‘in farm fields south of Paris, where billions of Euros are being ploughed into a new modern university campus designed to rival Harvard, MIT and Cambridge as one of the world's best’

Thailand has also joined the world-class university band wagon in its efforts to become the educational hub of Asia. The country is reported to be working on a project involving nine of its top universities, whose international ranking should improve within three years.

Korea has come up with a more elaborate programme (see box one) that focuses more on internalisation of research and teaching teams. The programme will promote ‘new growth technologies’ and promote interdisciplinary studies that consolidate the fields of basic sciences and humanities and social sciences which will contribute to national, social and academic development.

Box 1: KOREA -World Class University Project

The Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) is inviting excellent scholars and researchers from around the world to establish new academic projects and conduct joint research at Korean universities in the field of emerging technologies.

Focus is placed on supporting new growth-generating technologies that will spearhead national development. The ministry will give priority to interdisciplinary studies that consolidate the fields of basic sciences and humanities and social sciences which will contribute to national, social and academic development.

Three types of activities are envisaged

Establishing new academic departments or specialized majors

High-quality foreign scholars are employed at Korean universities as full-time faculty members, on a contract of three years minimum, to establish new academic departments or specialized majors at the universities.

Recruiting foreign scholars to existing academic projects

Foreign scholars are employed as full-time faculty members at existing departments of Korean universities to conduct joint research with Korean academics. Recruited foreign scholars are expected to be capable of developing new growth-generating technologies and also creating interdisciplinary studies.

Inviting distinguished world-class scholars

Distinguished scholars (including pioneering high-tech engineers) are invited as part-time faculty members to conduct academic or research activities in a Korean university for a period of at least two months per academic year.

(SOURCE: MRS-Material Research Society – www.mrs.rs/s_sec.asp?)

ARWU (Academic Ranking of World Universities) have further enriched our stock of acronyms, as has WUC (International Conference on World Class Universities) that have become a regular biannual event. ‘World Class Universities’ have in fact become a field of academic enquiry, as judged by the ever-rising volume of academic writings on the subject and by the fact that the institution that popularised university ranking in 2003 now has, in its graduate school of Education an International Centre for World Class Universities.

One interesting development is the tendency to equate the position of a nation’s universities on the global league table of world class universities as an index of the nation’s capacity for global competitiveness. Consequently, raising the global ranking of universities is seen as a step towards raising the level of a nation’s global competitiveness.

Where does this emerging global scenario place Africa with its low scores on all indices of sustainable human development (as seen in figure one above)? In particular, how best can Africa (and particularly Nigeria) best respond to the challenges posed by the low global ranking of its universities, especially in a situation in which its human development index scores are abysmally low?

‘There are major differences in the ranking methodologies used. These differences can be seen in the definitions of what constitutes quality, in the criteria and indicators used to measure quality, in the measurement processes as well as in the presentation format. These differences result in very different ranking approaches. Consequently, the ranking results differ considerably from one ranking approach to another.’ (SCIMERTICA –May 2010: Ranking Methodology-How are universities ranked?)

A myriad of ranking agents and ranking methodologies have emerged in the past half a decade. We shall however highlight only the three most widely known. These are

ARWU (Academic Ranking of World Universities) was first published in June 2003 by the Centre for World-Class Universities and the Institute for Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. It is updated on an annual basis and uses six objective indicators to rank world universities

More than 1000 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 are published on the web. The initial intention of ARWU was to find the global standing of Chinese top universities, but it has attracted a great deal of attention worldwide. It has been widely cited and used as a starting point for identifying national strengths and weaknesses as well as facilitating reform.

TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION-QS WORLD UNIVERSITY RANKINGS- is an annual publication that ranked the "Top 200 World Universities", and published by Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) between 2004 and 2009. The full listings consist of 600 ranked universities. The ranking weights are as explained in table one

Indicator	Explanation	Weighting
Academic Peer Review	Composite score drawn from peer review survey (which is divided into five subject areas). 9,386 responses in 2009 (6,354 in 2008).	40%
Employer Review	Score based on responses to employer survey. 3,281 responses in 2009 (2,339 in 2008).	10%
Faculty Student Ratio	Score based on student faculty ratio	20%
Citations per Faculty	Score based on research performance factored against the size of the research body	20%
International Faculty	Score based on proportion of international faculty	5%
International Students	Score based on proportion of international students	5%

While the rankings have been applauded in university circles, they have been criticized for placing too much emphasis on peer review, which receives 40% of the overall score, and some have expressed concern about the manner in which the peer review has been carried out

THE “WORLD UNIVERSITIES' RANKING ON THE WEB” is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group of the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CCHS) part of the National Research Council (CSIC) the largest public research body in Spain. Known as the "Webometrics Ranking of World Universities", it was officially launched in 2004, and it is updated every 6 months .The goal of the project is to convince academic and political communities of the importance of the web publication not only for dissemination of the academic knowledge but for measuring scientific activities, performance and impact too.

2. Taking due account of linguistic, cultural, economic, and historical contexts. The project intends to have true global coverage, not narrowing the analysis to a few hundreds of institutions

Its catalogue of institutions includes not only universities but also other Higher Education institutions following the recommendations of UNESCO

In collecting processing of data, the emphasis is on audited and verifiable data. Ranking is a small set of globally available, free access search engines. The published tables show all the Web indicators used in a very synthetic and visual way. Rankings are provided not only from a central Top 4000 classification but also considering several regional rankings for comparative purposes.

All the existing rankings of universities tend to focus on QUALITY. The issues have been that definition of Quality differs among the rating agencies. They also differ widely in terms of the indicators used, as well as on the weightings given to specific indicators. They have also not taken due cognisance of geographical, cultural and political differences among and across nations. It is in response to such issues that UNESCO’s European Center for Higher Education (CEPES) in 2004 convened a meeting of experts to provide more objective and across-nations applicable guidelines for the ranking of universities. The result is The Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Institutions (2006), an abridged version of which can be found as Appendix 1 to this paper. The ‘Universities’ Ranking on the Web’ project (described in the foregoing paragraph) is in fact one attempt to apply the Berlin Principles.

One criticism of the existing ranking systems is that one cannot speak with confidence on their mutual comparability. A good illustration is the ranking of Nigerian universities by two different ‘rankers’ for the current year (2010). The first (table 2) shows only four of the country’s universities featuring on the league table of Africa’s top 100 universities. The second table three, by a Swiss ranking agency, shows twelve Nigerian institutions featuring among the continent’s 100 top universities. This gross disparity, also seen in the other regions of the world, has led commentators to ask that the rankers should themselves be ranked.

Table 3: Nigerian Institutions on the African Universities League Table (4ic web ranking): 2010

The two best known ranking agencies are also in the process of evolving new indicators and reviewing their ranking methodologies in response to criticism by stakeholders. Evidence of efforts in this direction is reproduced in box two.

Subject Rankings have also been introduced. This is often country-specific, as in the case of the United Kingdom ranking subjects according to entrant A-level scores and post-degree destinations. Ranking for 70 subjects carries out in 2007 is reproduced as Annex Two.

Salmi (2008) after reviewing evidence from various sources and agreeing with other reviewers that some of the criteria used can be too subjective and subject to inconsistencies, came up with a ‘manageable definition’ in the form of what can be characterized as a 3-factor model as a distinguishing factor of world class universities (table three). In his words, ‘the attainment of world class status by a university would involve an alignment of these three factors, to ensure dynamic interaction among them .

Salmi’s model is in our view easy to understand and easy to apply. It is based on an analysis of what makes great universities great, what the real features of world class status are, and what institutions must look for in analysing their own strengths and weaknesses and in working towards the attainment of world class status. It is for this reason that this discussion will recommend the 3-factor model as working tool for putting Nigerian universities on the world status path.

Table 3: A Three-Factor Characterization of World Class Universities (after Salmi)

The starting point would be the current score card of Nigerian universities on the discreet items of Salmi’s 3-factor model. More scientific and objective rating procedures would have to be in their quest for world class status would be well advised to make that their necessary first step. The indicative descriptions in table four below gives a rough and ready picture of the current far-from-world-status level of a large number of universities in the country. It suffices for the purposes of a general discussion of this nature.

Table 4: An Estimation of Nigerian universities’ Score Card on University World Standard Features

Table four reveals the distance in standards, quality, operational environment and resources separating Nigerian institutions from the world class status goal. Tables two and three are even more revealing. In the first table, the most highly rated Nigerian university is rated 55^th in Africa and 5,846^th globally. The second table, while not showing global rankings, shows the most highly rated Nigerian university as occupying the 25^th position in Africa. These rankings go to show that Nigerian universities still have a wide gulf separating them from world-class status.

For the nation to avoid being swept off by the flood of Globalisation and in order to prepare its universities to deliver the world-standard education needed to enhance the nation’s global competitiveness (socio-economically speaking), concerted interventions would be needed on two complementary fronts. System-level re-engineering would provide the foundation and the environment, while institutional level re-branding would be the grassroots operationalisation of the nation’s world-status goals of its universities. The necessary interventions are itemised in table four and will be further elaborated upon in the next two subsections of this discussion

Interventions along the following lines should provide the solid bedrock for practical actions in creating an enabling environment for moving-towards-world-class-status initiatives at the institutional level.

Future development of higher education has to be guided by a national policy that addresses burning issues in the sub-sector and provide national guidelines for addressing them. Prominent among such issues are the following

What is most important is the methodology of developing such a policy. Participatory, stakeholder inclusive and consultative methodologies have a greater tendency to endure than policies imposed from above.

While a policy provides guidelines for major decisions, a strategic plan provides practical tools for ensuring that a policy really makes a positive difference

For a plan to be strategic, it must see the forest and not the individual trees. This means that it must take a holistic view of issues. A strategic plan also deals with the root causes of issues; not simply their surface manifestations. Such a plan often takes a long term perspective view of issues, even though it could include medium term sub-phases. Above all, a strategic plan does not address all possible challenges. Instead it limits itself with issues of strategic importance – issues that do impact on a lot of related issues. Issues are prioritised with emphasis on higher impact areas

As in all development initiatives, participatory, inclusive stakeholder methodologies yield the most desirable results in strategic planning. Therefore, Nigeria’s national strategic plans for secondary education must not be simply ‘written’ or ‘drafted’. It has to be ‘developed’ by working with stakeholders (as opposed to working for them). A plan for the development of higher education must also be systemically linked with plans for pre-tertiary education.

Without a strategic plan, educational development runs the risk of ‘zigzagging’. The match towards world-class status by Nigerian universities cannot be left to ‘zigzag’.

Without an investment plan, education strategic plans can become mere wish lists. The task is not over until we have got a clear idea of the resource implications of a strategic plan. The resources will be personnel, material, services, equipment, buildings, infrastructure, etc. In the final analysis it all boils down to MONEY. Therefore, the financial implications of the strategic development of strategic plans for higher education will have to be worked out in great detail.

Working out the detailed cost implications of a national higher strategic plan is just the first step. This will be followed by a determination of possible sources of funding (government, user fees, development partners, etc). Finally, there will be the real strategic decisions of what to invest in, how and at what specific points.

‘When I met the President of Vietnam, I said: ‘I do not ask you for more money. Give me more autonomy, more freedom, more responsibility, more transparency, more flexibility to meet the requirements of our society and globalisation’..... National government can build global capacity or strangle it with red tape.... the University of Melbourne has been a success story mainly because it developed more autonomy, more space to move’.--- Samuel Marginson, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne, Australia

What the above quotations shows is that academic freedom is a condition for the flourish of university systems. Over-regulation stifles creativity, while red tape introduces unnecessary delays and makes innovation difficult. These are lessons for the Nigerian system. Academic freedom should given full reign as a condition for putting our universities on the world-class status path.

It is not possible to position all the universities in Nigeria on the world-class status part in a single fell swoop. The universities are of uneven standing, in terms of personnel, facilities, achievements, recognition and potentials. A step-wise strategy that categorizes universities into three ‘academic power’ types could work wonders in programming further development of higher education in Nigeria.

Figure two above presents a 3-tier categorization with the following distinct specifications

New universities will operate at Category Three level and their upward movement will depend on appropriate enrichment of facilities and personnel and their contribution to manpower development for the nation. The largest proportion of universities will belong to Category Two, while Category will be limited to top universities selected for nurturance following strictly academic criteria.

Universities should be of service to the nation and one sure way of enhancing this function is for the nation to challenge them with specific assignments. In the Nigerian context, this can take the following concrete forms

Such a move would have the advantage of enhancing the social responsiveness of our universities. It will also ensure closer link between university research and national development challenges. It will minimise duplication of research efforts. Above all, it will help to enhance research capacities in the universities, make them visible through their work, make them more accountable to society and improve their chances of gaining international recognition.

Addressing this challenge would involve infusing quality into education right from the basic level. This does not mean more competitive and selective examinations, for Nigerian students are already over-examined. It does not simply mean more money, more facilities and more teachers. What is required is a more holistic view of Quality in education (see table six) that reminds us of the adage ‘what you sow is what you reap’.

In terms of quality education, what we sow are the inputs (left-hand column), the way we cultivate these are the processes (centre column) and the yield we get constitute the outcomes. Therefore, quality inputs going through quality processing most likely yields quality results. The intervention needed to infuse quality into Nigerian education at the pre-tertiary level (to increase the chances of having quality students at the tertiary level) should therefore address the quality challenge in a more holistic and comprehensive sense).

The issue here is not just ‘more money’; it has more to do with ‘better money’ – making the best of available resources in order to attract more resources for continued high level performance. Our key considerations (in relation to contributing to moving our universities towards the world-class status path) are

responsiveness to national development needs, available only to the most promising initiatives and rewarding extra-ordinary efforts.

Re-engineering at the system level only serves to provide both a prompt and a support to more intensive efforts at the institutional level to give practical effect to the dreams at the system level. Reflecting on the Nigerian university education context, we would make eleven concrete suggestions for institutional level re-branding.

The conventional view of leadership emphasizes positional power and conspicuous accomplishment. But true leadership is about creating a domain in which we continually learn and become more capable of participating in our unfolding future. A true leader thus sets the stage on which predictable miracles . . . can--and do—occur ... Joseph Jaworski, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership

“Leadership and physics share a common focus. Physics explains the energy, matter and motion that define how the universe works. In the same way, leadership is the power that galvanizes human energy and translates it into action. So the exercise of leadership can be viewed as the practice of human physics.” ... Warren Blank, the Nine Natural Laws of Leadership

A visionary leader has the ability for systems thinking, taking the entire system (and not bits and pieces of it) in his or her focus. Such a leader is also capable of acting strategically, identifying and acting on issues that are most likely to impact most positively on the entire system. Visionary leaders are also usually horizontally skilled (with a cross-disciplinary outlook) in addition to being specialists in their own rights, and so also vertically skilled. Above everything else, a visionary leader is also equipped with advanced visioning skills – the ability to see beyond the immediate, to perceive early social warning systems, to anticipate, to act proactively, and to plan and project in a long term perspective.

A visionary leader also aims as TRANSFORMATION (of persons, systems, processes), rather than mere TRANSACTIONS (being there to oil bureaucracy and tradition. This distinction is well captured in table seven.

The above considerations have implications for the choice of Vice-Chancellors for Nigerian Universities. The selection criteria must now discard primordial affinities, to build on a hierarchy of academic distinction, managerial aptitude and most importantly visionary/transformational leadership proven competence. University ‘leadership’ can then replace mere University ‘headship’. This should be the necessary first step in driving a university towards the world-class status path.

universities also have ‘master plans’ for physical and academic development. The extent to which these can qualify as strategic plans is a question that should be further looked into. There is, most importantly, the need to ensure that the goals of existing strategic plans are really shared by academic units within each university.

Nigerian universities have tended to mirror public sector management structures and patterns. They have also tended to over-man non-academic units while not adequately manning academic units. There is also a committee system that has gone beyond its original goal of ensuring openness and participatory decision-making to become a bureaucratisation instrument. There is in addition a slow movement towards the generalisation of ICT as a management tool. Information management has been a big challenge and has not facilitated interaction with stakeholders. Management education is yet to become the ‘in-thing’ for academics exercising management functions. Career-long management education for persons in management positions is still not obligatory. Academic structures half also remained remain unwieldy in some places, with no clear rationale for the creation of new units, and with the practice of pulling resources together for inter-disciplinary activities not clearly in force. Discipline of academic staff is still relatively lax. Job descriptions are often not in place, while there is little unanimity on conditions for career advancement.

Transformational management of Nigerian universities will have to take all this in its stride

Today’s knowledge Economy is making new demands on universities and university teachers in terms of their knowledge management functions. For each aspect of these (knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination and knowledge application) the older order (centre column of table eight) has yielded place to new (the right hand column). This means that, for teachers to fit into the new scheme of things, they will have to be persons with the requisite aptitudes, rather than persons with the requisite qualifications. The essential ingredients of these aptitudes are:

Table 8: Yes and No Demands of the Knowledge Economy on the Knowledge Management Functions of University Teachers

Re-profiling university teachers therefore means taking appropriate steps to move them from the current ‘No’ position in table eight to the ‘Yes’ position, which is the position closer to the desired world-class status path.

The issue here is NOT increased vocationalization of university programmes; it is more that of bringing ‘twenty-first century skills into university curricula. These are not the conventional hard skills of subject mastery and the practical application of skills, but skills of a softer nature that prepares the graduate for the demands of today’s world of work. Known as the Core Generic Skills, these are:

These have become the real disciplines of higher education. The conventional disciplines can now only prepare the student for life and work in the 21^st century if the core generic skills are embedded in them, or if they are used as vehicles for inculcating the core generic skills.

The core generic skills concept is predicated on the fact that narrow specialisation and restricted subject matter knowledge have no place in a knowledge economy that is characterised by uncertainty, and which requires adaptability and openness to the demands of lifelong learning. The implications for future curriculum organisation in universities are outlined in table eight, from which we should take particular note of the following features

The performance of alumni will always be a determinant of the world-class standing of a university, and this will to a great extent depend on the curricular exposure of alumni in their student days.

The bulk of what constitutes the curriculum for a learning programme is in fact imperceptible, but its impact on the learner (positive or negative) can be long-lasting. Most of it is not consciously programmed, but they do exist and constitute that aspect of a curriculum that is mainly ‘caught’, rather than ‘caught’. For a university, implicit curricula would consist of all non-codified, non-examinable, relatively unstructured, institutionally-engineered, relatively non-formal learning opportunities offered to the student and the entire academic community. They should cover a wide variety of choices, to address all-round development and widening of students’ horizons

World class universities attract world-class researchers, most of whom are also world-class teachers, who teach in creative ways to ensure quality learning in students. The prevailing pattern in Nigeria is to blame lack of quality learning on ‘ill-prepared and unserious’ students. Therefore, student failure is never treated as institutional and system failure.

Nigerian universities, in moving towards world-status path, would need a paradigm shift in this direction and this should be one in which the provision of opportunities (and the enablement of teachers in the process) for student quality learning is a major responsibility.

Most importantly, all Nigerian academics, University teachers would need help in ‘de-lecturizing the lecture’. As can be seen from the above learning pyramid, the more we engage in formal lectures, the less the quality of student learning.

Research is what distinguishes a university from other types of tertiary institutions. Research gives visibility to a university and contributes to raising its ranking among similar institutions. It is most beneficial if it is:

Research is a systematic activity that cannot simply be left to chance. One way of showing a university’s commitment to it is to have a research agenda. As figure four above shows, it should begin with a University-wide agenda derived from an area of national concern. Faculties will then develop their own specific agendas taking a cue from the overall institutional agenda. From this, individual departments and teams of researchers derive their own agendas. The whole thing is a chain, with agenda at one level linking up to the ones above it, and the results of research efforts contributing in a cumulative manner to the development of knowledge, of the institution, of its programmes, and of individual academics

A research agenda does not prevent teachers from doing their own thing, research-wise. It simply helps to channel individual efforts to the realisation of institutional research goals. It also enables a University to develop some niche academic fields for which it would be well known.

Globalization and the knowledge economy do not admit of ‘this is Nigeria’ and there is now simply only one standard – the international standard. Academics are not simply employees of their universities, but really of their disciplines and they are judged according to the international tenets of their disciplines. Research follows internal precepts, irrespective of where they are conducted. The fruits of good research are internationally shared. Knowledge knows no geographical or political boundaries. To put Nigerian universities on world-class path is to get them to accept and to operate by a set of international values.

One value treasured by world-class universities is the internationalisation of staff and students. According to Salmi (2008), Harvard has 19% international students, Stanford 21%, Columbia 23%, and Cambridge 18%. Salmi also reported that 30% of the academic staff of Harvard is international, while the comparative figures for Cambridge is 33% and Oxford 36%. This phenomenon ensures the co-existence of several ‘universes’ (cultural, linguistic, political, philosophical, racial, etc) in a university.

In Nigerian universities, the opposite extreme is the case. In-breeding has replaced universality and the system has been the victim. A step-wise redress strategy would be needed here.

Strategic development plans at the institutional level would need to consider appropriate strategies of expanding each institution’s universe - considering how to improve the international mix of staff and students, in addition to how to internationalise facilities, programmes and university management to meet international standards. This would be in addition to thinking INTERNATIONAL with regards to its core functions of research, teaching and society engagement.

This discussion has dwelt on a subject of importance to the survival of the Nigerian university system, and by extension an issue that really touches on our national survival. Our institutions have consistently received poor world ratings, irrespective of rating agencies and rating methodologies. In the African context, universities (especially in South Africa and Egypt) are struggling to enhance their world ratings. Countries in many parts of the world have recognised university improvement as a prelude to enhancing their international competitiveness and they are targeting resources to investment areas that will ensure that their universities come on top.

Putting our universities on world-class path should be an important feature of our education road map. Concrete issues to be addressed in prioritizing this world-class promotion have been highlighted in this discussion. They are important as the rock on which fine-tuning action at the institutional level. A lot still depends on the institutions themselves. Genuine university leadership is the answer. Once institutional headship gives way to institutional headship, the task of climbing the steep hills to world-class status can start

At the system level, there has to be a paradigm shift from merely siting universities to actually establishing them. The latter term implies that care will be taken to ensure that they are given the resources and the autonomy to operate the way universities operate globally

Finally, we must re-iterate the point that the path to world-class status for Nigerian universities is a long, rough and hilly one. That is why we have limited our ambition in this discussion to putting the universities on the world-class status path. The hope is that placing them on this path would be the necessary first step in moving them progressively up the world-class status summit. This is something we have to plan for and most importantly implement in a systematic manner.

Rankings and league tables should:

A. Purposes and Goals of Rankings

1. be one of a number of diverse approaches to the assessment of higher education inputs,

Processes and outputs. Rankings can provide comparative information and improved

Understanding of higher education, but should not be the main method for assessing what

Higher education is and does. Rankings provide a market-based perspective that can

Complement the work of government, accrediting authorities, and independent review agencies.

2. be clear about their purpose and their target groups. Rankings have to be designed with

Due regard to their purpose. Indicators designed to meet a particular objective or to

Inform one target group may not be adequate for different purposes or target groups.

3. Recognize the diversity of institutions and take the different missions and goals of

Institutions into account. Quality measures for research-oriented institutions, for example, are quite different from those that are appropriate for institutions that provide

Broad access to underserved communities. Institutions that are being ranked and the

Experts that inform the ranking process should be consulted often.

4. Provide clarity about the range of information sources for rankings and the messages each source generates. The relevance of ranking results depends on the audiences

Receiving the information and the sources of that information (such as databases, students, professors, employers). Good practice would be to combine the different

Perspectives provided by those sources in order to get a more complete view of each

Higher education institution included in the ranking.

5. Specify the linguistic, cultural, economic, and historical contexts of the educational

Systems being ranked. International rankings in particular should be aware of possible

biases and be precise about their objective. Not all nations or systems share the same

values and beliefs about what constitutes “quality” in tertiary institutions, and ranking

systems should not be devised to force such comparisons.

B. Design and Weighting of Indicators

6. Be transparent regarding the methodology used for creating the rankings. The choice of

methods used to prepare rankings should be clear and unambiguous. This transparency

should include the calculation of indicators as well as the origin of data.

7. Choose indicators according to their relevance and validity. The choice of data should be grounded in recognition of the ability of each measure to represent quality and academic and institutional strengths, and not availability of data. Be clear about why measures were included and what they are meant to represent.

8. Measure outcomes in preference to inputs whenever possible. Data on inputs are relevant as they reflect the general condition of a given establishment and are more frequently

available. Measures of outcomes provide a more accurate assessment of the standing

and/or quality of a given institution or program, and compilers of rankings should ensure

that an appropriate balance is achieved.

9. Make the weights assigned to different indicators (if used) prominent and limit changes to them. Changes in weights make it difficult for consumers to discern whether an

institution’s or program’s status changed in the rankings due to an inherent difference or

due to a methodological change.

C) Collection and Processing of Data

10. Pay due attention to ethical standards and the good practice recommendations

articulated in these Principles. In order to assure the credibility of each ranking, those

responsible for collecting and using data and undertaking on-site visits should be as

objective and impartial as possible.

11. Use audited and verifiable data whenever possible. Such data have several advantages,

including the fact that they have been accepted by institutions and that they are

comparable and compatible across institutions.

12. Include data that are collected with proper procedures for scientific data collection. Data

collected from an unrepresentative or skewed subset of students, faculty, or other parties

may not accurately represent an institution or program and should be excluded.

13. Apply measures of quality assurance to ranking processes themselves. These processes should take note of the expertise that is being applied to evaluate institutions and use this knowledge to evaluate the ranking itself. Rankings should be learning systems continuously utilizing this expertise to develop methodology.

14. Apply organizational measures that enhance the credibility of rankings. These measures could include advisory or even supervisory bodies, preferably with some international participation.

D) Presentation of Ranking Results

15. Provide consumers with a clear understanding of all of the factors used to develop a ranking, and offer them a choice in how rankings are displayed. This way, the users of rankings would have a better understanding of the indicators that are used to rank institutions or programs. In addition, they should have some opportunity to make their own decisions about how these indicators should be weighted.

16. Be compiled in a way that eliminates or reduces errors in original data, and be organized and published in a way that errors and faults can be corrected. Institutions and the public should be informed about errors that have occurred.

Berlin, 20 May 2006