University rankings have gained popularity around the world and are now a significant factor shaping reputation. This second edition updates Ellen Hazelkorn's first comprehensive study of rankings from a global perspective, drawing in new original research and extensive analysis. It is essential reading for policymakers, managers and scholars.

University rankings have gained popularity around the world and are now a significant factor shaping reputation. This second edition updates Ellen Hazelkorn's first comprehensive study of rankings from a global perspective, drawing in new original research and extensive analysis. It is essential reading for policymakers, managers and scholars.

University rankings have gained popularity around the world, and are now a significant factor shaping reputation. This book is the first comprehensive study of rankings from a global perspective, making an important contribution to our understanding of the rankings phenomenon. This book has also been published in Japanese.

This book examines the quality assessment movement in academic scholarship, as globalization prompts a search for global measures of university services and output. It gauges productivity in terms of universal publication metrics, and considers ranking and research productivity from a comparative perspective. The book considers the use of the “impact factor” as a gauge of publication value, noting that this less important in countries lacking central government appropriations to universities and to research. It argues that pressure to publish in certain journals, and to research topics of interest to English language readers, has been felt differentially in English-language systems, compared to others, but also that performance pressures fall more on younger, more juniour, contract staff, than on senior and tenured professors. It problematizes international comparisons of quality, and analyses the benefits of a zone of ideas and metrics in a common language – promoting international mobility, efficiency, collaboration - but also the costs which are rarely borne equally across countries, languages and cultures. The book provides a strong, evidence-based contribution to major debates in contemporary higher education reforms and the measurement of academic output.

This book provides a cutting-edge analysis of the ways in which higher education institutions have become more international over the past two decades. Drawing upon a range of post-foundational spatial, network, and mobilities theories, the book shifts our thinking away from linear, binary, Western accounts of internationalization to understand the complex, multi-centered and contradictory ways in which internationalization processes have played out across a wide variety of higher education landscapes worldwide. The author explores transnational student, scholar, knowledge, program and provider mobilities; the production of mobile bodies, knowledges, and identities; the significance of place in internationalization; and the crucial role that global university rankings play in reshaping the spatial landscape of higher education.

Delivering quality education to students while remaining competitive at an international level is only one of the many challenges universities face today. To attain their goals, universities must adopt new strategies to achieve academic excellence. World University Rankings and the Future of Higher Education is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on the implementation of a ranking system for higher education institutions, providing a thorough overview of the impacts of these rankings on educational quality. Exploring the benefits and challenges of this system in a global context, this book is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, students, administrators, and policy makers interested in the effects of university rankings in the education sector and beyond.

The growing impact of university rankings on public policy and on students choices has stirred controversy worldwide. This unique volume brings together the architects of university rankings and their critics to debate the uses and misuses of existing rankings. With voices from five continents, it provides a comprehensive overview of current thinking on the subject and sets out alternative approaches and complementary tools for a new era of transparent and informed use of higher education ranking tables.

Reveals how international competition for university students is impacting higher education and explains the benefits of this competition, which allows students to choose from diverse educational settings and programs.

Forging closer links between university research and teaching has become an important way to enhance the quality of higher education across the world. As student engagement takes centre stage in academic life, how can academics and university leaders engage with their students to connect research and teaching more effectively? In this highly accessible book, the contributors show how students and academics can work in partnership to shape research-based education. Featuring student perspectives, it offers academics and university leaders practical suggestions and inspiring ideas on higher education pedagogy, including principles of working with students as partners in higher education, connecting students with real-world outputs, transcending disciplinary boundaries in student research activities, connecting students with the workplace, and innovative assessment and teaching practices. Written and edited in full collaboration with students and leading educator-researchers from a wide spectrum of academic disciplines, this book poses fundamental questions about learning and learning communities in contemporary higher education.

In the last half century higher education has moved from the fringe to the centre of society and accumulated a long list of functions. In the English-speaking world, Europe and much of East Asia more than two thirds of all school students enter tertiary education. Bulging at the seams, universities are meant to be fountains of new knowledge, engines of prosperity and innovation, drivers of regional growth, skilled migration and global competitiveness, and makers of equality of opportunity. Yet universities cannot drive prosperity on their own and they can do little to stop rising income inequality, which is shaped by taxation policy and income determination in the workplace. Worse, the growing emphasis on the private benefits of higher education, without regard for its public benefits, has positioned the higher education sector as elite forming, as a maker of social inequality rather than a corrective to it. In the English-speaking countries, in which government sees itself as servant of high capitalism, official policy models higher education as a market and has narrowed its purpose to the enhancement of individual earnings and employability, partly to justify the ever-rising tuition fees. Higher education systems have become intensely competitive and increasingly stratified, with value concentrated at the top. In this quasi-aristocratic economics of education, mass institutions are losing social value and the collective public benefits of universities are unmonitored, underfunded and ignored. In short, governments expect both too much and too little of higher education, and its contribution to the common good is being eroded. Yet this sector can play a key role in rebuilding social solidarity and mobility in fractured societies.