Ranking universities : how to take better account of diversity

Abstract

In order to rank universities, rather than aggregating the indicators used by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) - using weightings which, though reasonable, are at the same time arbitrary and inflexible - one can compare universities in termes of dominance and hence deduce various partial or complete rankings. The resultant dominance ranking method is presented in this note. Data are recalled in Appendix 1. Appendix provides full details of the dominance analysis for each university. From this analysis two listings are derived : (i) a front runners list consisting of 34 ‘non-dominated’ universities (Table 4) and (ii) a (new) ranking of the 200 universities surveyed by the THES, based on their respective ‘active-passive dominance’ scores (Table 5). Concluding remarks bear on limits of the data and of the exercise.