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The paper outlines seven core traits of “classic” rankings and shows how major systems increasingly violate them through research-focused metrics and international comparisons across regions.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & 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frontiers in institutional comparisons  \nAlex Usher  \nEducational Policy Institute, Toronto, Canada  \nThe number of university rankings systems in use around the world has increased dramatically over the last decade. As they have spread, they have mutated; no longer are ranking systems simply clones of the original ranking systems such as US News and World Report. A number of different types of ‘mutation’ have occurred, so that there are now varieties of rankings around the world. The purpose of this short paper is to describe these mutations and examine likely future developments in rankings as they continue to spread across the globe.  \nUniversity rankings are not a new phenomenon.Infact, they date back to the beginning of the 20th century, when some US states began publishing institutional pass rates on state licensing exams in things such as law and dentistry. Later, Henry Herbert Maclean worked on a series of so-called ‘genius studies’. The first, entitled‘Where We Get Our Best Men’, provided statistics on the nationality and educational background of the country’s most prominent scientists and men of business – the high counts for places like Harvard and Yale were taken as proof that these institutions were the country’s best. Other early attempts to classify and rank institutions involved interviews of institutional officials such as Presidents, Deans or Department Heads, either asking them what they thought of the quality of graduates of various institutions (in the case of Kendrick Babcock’s work on behalf of the US Bureau of Education and later the Association ofAmerican Universities) or asking them who they thought the ‘best men’in their respective disciplines were and then developing rankings based on the number of‘best men’who matriculated at various institutions (a similar logic is at work today in the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings’ use of alumni Nobel prizes and Field medals as an indicator) .  \nRemarkably, the top ten institutions in these ranking from over a hundred years ago looks very similar to  \nthe top ten in current rankings such as US News and World Report.  \nIn the 1960s, with the development of large scientific databases such as the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index,it became possible to provide some quantitative measurements of academic staff members’ output, and various journal articles appeared comparing these. Indeed, these statistics also played some role in the 1982 Assessment of Research Doctorate Programs conducted by the US National Academy of Sciences.  \nThese rankings, perhaps because of their scientific and quantitative nature and the fact that they only purported to rank graduate programmes, did not provoke much controversy. It was only in the mid-1980s, when US News and World Report began ranking entire universities and, more specifically, touted ranking as a tool to assist in the selection of undergraduate institutions, that real controversy was aroused and people began to view rankings as a dangerously reductionist way of evaluating education.Yet, its reductionist character was also part of what intrigued the public about rankings: they appeared to illuminate certain aspect of institutional quality which had previously appeared opaque. And, as tuition fees began to appear in new countries (such as in the UK and China in the late 1990s) or increase rapidly (such as Canada in the early  \nvol. 51, no. 2, 2009 University Rankings 2.0, Alex Usher 87  \nA U S T R A L I A N U N I V E R S I T I E S ’ R E V I E W  \n1990s), the need for consumer guides to evaluate educational investments grew, and rankings seemed to fit that bill rather nicely.  \nThese original ‘classic’ rankings – such as US News and World Report and other closely modelled on it like Canada’s Maclean’s rankings or Poland’s Rzeszpospolita – essentially shared seven key features. In North America, these seven features","cbCaisr04er3Cxdf","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaisr04er3Cxdf","pdf",90179,"English","# University Rankings 2.0\n## Purpose and evolution of ranking systems\n## Early precedents and quantitative approaches\n## Controversy and the consumer-guide era\n## Classic rankings: seven key features\n## Divergences: research-focused and international rankings","[{\"question\":\"What is the main purpose of “University Rankings 2.0”?\",\"answer\":\"To describe how university ranking systems have mutated and to examine likely future developments as rankings spread globally.\"},{\"question\":\"What controversy arose as rankings began to target entire universities?\",\"answer\":\"Real controversy emerged in the mid-1980s when rankings were framed as tools for selecting undergraduate institutions, leading people to view rankings as reductionist.\"},{\"question\":\"What are the seven key features of classic university rankings?\",\"answer\":\"They focus on the undergraduate experience, operate nationally, compare whole institutions, use ordinal aggregated scoring, present a single winner narrative, rely on official or institutional survey data, and are managed by commercial media outlets.\"}]","University Rankings 2.0 - New frontiers in institutional comparisons | PDF",1792081140]