An international group of educators, higher-education experts, and publishers that met in Berlin last month has come up with a set of principles for ranking colleges and universities.
The 16 principles of good practice, dubbed the “Berlin Principles on Ranking of Higher Education Institutions,” are a response to the explosion of college rankings in many countries since U.S. News & World Report published the first such listings in 1983.
College rankings — or league tables, as they are known in Britain — were at first widely dismissed in academe, but they appear to be popular with students and their parents.
The Berlin principles are meant to serve as voluntary guidelines for groups that produce rankings.
In a statement accompanying the list of principles, the group wrote that the purpose of the guidelines was to ensure that “those producing rankings and league tables hold themselves accountable for quality in their own data collection, methodology, and dissemination.”
Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, an independent group based in Washington, called the principles “the beginnings of a self-regulatory process.”
More Transparency
Among the principles are recommendations that rankings should: Recognize the diversity of institutions and take the different missions and goals of institutions into account; be transparent regarding the methodology used for creating the rankings’ measure outcomes, such as retention and graduation rates, in preference to inputs, such as entrance-examination scores, whenever possible; and offer consumers a choice in how rankings are displayed, such as by allowing them to determine how factors are weighed on interactive Web sites.
The meeting, which was attended by 47 people from a dozen countries, was organized by Mr. Merisotis’s group and the Unesco-European Centre for Higher Education, which is based in Bucharest, Romania.
‘Some Corrections’
Jan Sadlak, director of the Unesco Centre, said the principles were meant to improve what many academic leaders see as the superficial and capricious nature of rankings. “If we’re going to have to live with it, let’s do it in the least destructive way,” he said.
Robert J. Morse, who directs the college rankings at U.S. News & World Report and attended the Berlin meeting, says the publication has continually improved its ranking system over the past two decades.
For example, criteria have been shifted to give more emphasis to outcomes and less to input measures.
A more recent ranking system, run by the Institute of Higher Education, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in China, is considered the most influential international ranking. It has been criticized for giving too much emphasis to Nobel Prizes won by faculty members, even decades earlier.
Officials at the Chinese institute are paying attention to those concerns, said Mr. Sadlak, of Unesco. “There will be some corrections.”
Another meeting, set for the fall of 2007 in Shanghai, will focus on the idea of establishing a system of certification of rankings that follow principles of good practice.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 52, Issue 40, Page A40
