Australia’s James Cook University recently announced that it opted out of a major international ranking system for universities, which is published in The Times Higher Education World University Rankings. (also here) The reason wasn’t because the uni had been doing poorly. In fact, the vice chancellor explained that JCU had consistently scored in the 300-400 range – which is pretty good.
The reason was that the ranking system places too much emphasis on international reputation, which downplays local or small institutions, and those that are more specialised. In other words, while the top rankers are no doubt good, the system excludes or downplays lots of great institutions that
Besides, reputation isn’t an objective measure of quality. Measuring and reporting on reputation is, at its worst, the process of gathering prejudices and and feeding them back to you. For example, do we really need a survey to tell us that Harvard is well-thought-of? No. We don’t.
