University Rankings: Theoretical Basis, Methodology and Impacts on Global Higher Education PDF
Preview University Rankings: Theoretical Basis, Methodology and Impacts on Global Higher Education
University Rankings The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective 3 Series Editors William K. Cummings, The George Washington University, Washington, USA Akira Arimoto, Kurashiki Sakuyo University, Kurashiki City, Okayama, Japan Editorial Board Jürgen Enders, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands Amy Metcalfe, the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Christine Musselin, CSO Research Interests Higher Education and Research, Paris, France Rui Santiago, University of Aveiro, Portugal Simon Schwartzman, Institute for Studies and Labour and Society, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Ulrich Teichler, University of Kassel, Germany Charles Wohluter, Northwest University, South Africa Scope of the series As the landscape of higher education has in recent years undergone significant changes, so correspondingly have the backgrounds, specializations, expectations and work roles of academic staff. The Academy is expected to be more professional in teaching, more productive in research and more entrepreneurial in everything. Some of the changes involved have raised questions about the attractiveness of an academic career for today’s graduates. At the same time, know ledge has come to be identified as the most vital resource of contemporary societies. The Changing Academy series examines the nature and extent of the changes experienced by the academic profession in recent years. It explores both the reasons for and the consequences of these changes. It considers the implications of the changes for the attractiveness of the academic profession as a career and for the ability of the academic community to contribute to the further development of knowledge societies and the attainment of national goals. It makes comparisons on these matters between different national higher education systems, institutional types, disciplines and generations of academics, drawing initially on available datasets and qualitative research studies with special emphasis on the recent twenty nation survey of the Changing Academic Profession. Among the themes featured will be: 1. Relevance of the Academy’s Work 2. Internationalization of the Academy 3. Current Governance and Management, particularly as perceived by the Academy 4. Commitment of the Academy The audience includes researchers in higher education, sociology of education and political science studies; university managers and administrators; national and institutional policy makers; officials and staff at governments and organizations, e.g. the World Bank. For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/8668 Jung Cheol Shin • Robert K. Toutkoushian Ulrich Teichler Editors University Rankings Theoretical Basis, Methodology and Impacts on Global Higher Education Editors Jung Cheol Shin Robert K. Toutkoushian Seoul National University University of Georgia Department of Education Institute of Higher Education Gwanakro 599 Meigs Hall 151742 Seoul, Gwanakgu 30602 Athens Georgia Korea, Republic of (South Korea) USA [email protected] [email protected] Ulrich Teichler Universität Kassel Internationales Zentrum für Hochschulforschung Kassel Mönchebergstr. 17 34109 Kassel Germany [email protected]kassel.de ISBN 9789400711150 eISBN 9789400711167 DOI 10.1007/9789400711167 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011928551 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acidfree paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Preface The book is designed to provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding on university ranking schemes – its theoretical basis, methodological issues, and impacts on society. Although rankings have been used in policy and academic discussions, there are rare books in the market which provide the comprehensive theoretical and methodological issues on rankings itself. Recently, policymakers and the media often criticize their universities based on their ranking status. Further, many of institutional leaders set rankings as their benchmark in their vision or master plan for the university. Nevertheless, academics are quite skeptical of rank ings because they believe that they mislead higher education institutions as well as have enormous methodological limitations. The book is not about how to enhance the ranking status of an institution, nor how to devise better ranking systems. Instead, we focused on how to widen the understanding of university rankings for different audiences – academics, rankers, and general people mostly parents and students. Academics, rankers, and their audiences have different views on university rankings and use them for different purposes. A group of academics have been developing precise technical methods of measuring institutional performance, but are less interested generally in its social impacts. Rankers do not pay much attention to the impacts that ranking games bring on higher education society. Instead, they are interested in how to update their ranking schemes better than their competing rankers so that they can sell the rankings through their publications. Audiences of rankings only pay attention to the ranking status of the university they are interested in, but not to the details behind the rankings. This book is designed to help bridge this gap between ranking specialists (academics), rankers, and ranking audiences. The book has three major parts. Part I reviews the theoretical and practical basis of university rankings, Part II focuses on the methodology used to derive rankings, and Part III discusses the social impacts of university rankings. In Part I, Jung Cheol Shin begins Chap. 2 with a discussion of organization effectiveness, which is the theoretical base of ranking survey, neglecting academic or policy discussions in many cases. Although a university’s ranking is a dimension of measuring institutional effectiveness, rankers and its audiences often disregard the fundamental issue that there are other aspects of effectiveness that should also be considered. Since the 1980s, the organizational effectiveness of higher education v vi Preface institutions has been evaluated by governments or their agencies to directly or indirectly link institutional performance with budget allocation in some countries (e.g., the USA, Australia, the UK, etc.). In Chap. 3, Grant Harman discusses university rankings as well as public accountability and quality assurance as an aspect of organizational effectiveness. Finally, in Chap. 4, Ulrich Teichler introduces and discusses ranking literature focusing on theoretical and practical agendas of rankings and its impacts on higher education. In Part II, we discuss the methodologies used to derive university rankings. In Chap. 5, Bernard Longden shows how rankers easily shift rankings by changing weights or by inclusion or exclusion of indicators. In Chap. 6, Karen Webber provides a comprehensive overview of how to measure institutional research, teaching, and service performance. In the next chapter, Robert K. Toutkoushian, Karen Webber, and Keith Trigwell discuss the details of measuring research and teaching performance. In Chap. 8, Lutz Bornmann leads further discussions on measuring research performance focusing on indicators, peer review, and reputation. This chapter provides contemporary theoretical and practical issues of measuring research perfor mance, such as how to count citations in the real world. The last topic we cover in Chap. 9 of Part II is about teaching quality. In Part III, the respective contributors discuss the social impacts of ranking survey. Although rankings are a dimension of organizational effectiveness, the social impacts of rankings are enormous. Part III begins with social influences of ranking survey at institution level. In Chap. 10, Christopher Morphew and Christopher Swanson discuss how higher education institutions respond to rankings. They have focused on how universities try to enhance their ranking status. In the Chap. 11, William Locke discusses how universities institutionalize ranking schemes into their internal systems and cultures. In Chap. 12, Akira Arimoto goes further on the ranking impacts on higher education institutions and discusses how the rankings impact faculty life on campus. The contributors of the book are wellknown researchers in higher education worldwide and have many years of teaching and research experiences at higher education institutions. We are confident that the issues we highlight and the theory and practice issues we discuss will contribute to academic society of ranking studies and also to the development of higher education. The work on this book can be traced back to papers that were prepared for and presented at the International Conference on Education Research (ICER11), which was hosted by Education Research Institute, Seoul National University in October 2009. We are grateful to Education Research Institute for the financial supports and organizing the conference. We thank JungEun Lee and HyunJu Park graduate students at Seoul National University for their contribution to the editorial works. Seoul National University, South Korea Jung Cheol Shin University of Georgia, USA Robert K. Toutkoushian University of Kassel, Germany Ulrich Teichler Acknowledgment Partial fulfillment of this work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF2010330B00232). vii Contents 1 The Past, Present, and Future of University Rankings ....................... 1 Jung Cheol Shin and Robert K. Toutkoushian Part I Organizational Effectiveness, Quality, and Rankings 2 Organizational Effectiveness and University Rankings ...................... 19 Jung Cheol Shin 3 Competitors of Rankings: New Directions in Quality Assurance and Accountability ............................................................... 35 Grant Harman 4 Social Contexts and Systemic Consequence of University Rankings: A Meta-Analysis of the Ranking Literature ...................... 55 Ulrich Teichler Part II Methodological Issues of University Rankings 5 Ranking Indicators and Weights ........................................................... 73 Bernard Longden 6 Measuring Faculty Productivity ............................................................ 105 Karen L. Webber 7 Measuring the Research Performance of Postsecondary Institutions ............................................................................................... 123 Robert K. Toutkoushian and Karen Webber 8 Peer Review and Bibliometric: Potentials and Problems ......................................................................... 145 Lutz Bornmann ix x Contents 9 Measuring Teaching Performance ......................................................... 165 Keith Trigwell Part III Social Impacts of University Rankings 10 On the Efficacy of Raising Your University’s Rankings ...................... 185 Christopher C. Morphew and Christopher Swanson 11 The Institutionalization of Rankings: Managing Status Anxiety in an Increasingly Marketized Environment ........................................ 201 William Locke 12 Reaction to Academic Ranking: Knowledge Production, Faculty Productivity from an International Perspective ..................... 229 Akira Arimoto 13 The Future of University Rankings ....................................................... 259 Ulrich Teichler Index ................................................................................................................. 267
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