International Rankings Universities
The Netherlands is one of the few countries where nearly all universities are listed in international rankings. Dutch universities are taking a more critical stance on global university rankings: these so-called league tables have methodological shortcomings.
In July 2023, Universities of the Netherlands published the Recommendation paper advisory document 'Ranking the university; On the effects of rankings on the academic community and how to overcome them’. In this opinion an expert group shows that league tables are unjustified in claiming to be able to sum up a university’s performance in the broadest sense in a single score.
There is no universally accepted criterion for quantifying a university’s overall performance, and a generic weighing tool cannot do justice to a university’s strategic choice to excel in specific areas.
Research, education, and impact achievements cannot be meaningfully combined to produce a one-dimensional overall score. Any attempt to do so will run into arbitrary and debatable decisions about how performance in these three core tasks should be weighted: is research more important than education? Or is it the other way around? When a weighting system is applied that emphasises one of those core tasks, universities that excel in a different task are disadvantaged. And what indicators should we use to measure a university’s performance on each of the three core tasks?
The way league tables measure performance on the various core tasks is debatable. Finally, league tables are mostly based on selfreported data and a methodology that lacks transparency.
The recommendation paper document 'Ranking the university; On the effects of rankings on the academic community and how to overcome them’ and the Administrative response from Universities of The Netherlands can be found here (only available in Dutch).