Abstract
Rankings, classifications and typologies of higher education institutions and their educational programmes are a global phenomenon and there is not much doubt as to whether they have their place and future in the field of evaluation of universities. Despite a number of weaknesses, the publication of international rankings of universities has been the only serious attempt at identification, evaluation and measurement of quality at international level until now.
Czech universities usually do not perform very well in international rankings. Just a few of them penetrate into the first two or three hundred best universities and even then they usually do not have very high scores.
However, does this really provide evidence about their quality? And what it does generally say about the quality of Czech higher education system? In order to answer these questions, the less visible face of rankings and also the ways how they are elaborated should be looked into more thoroughly. The study of the Education Policy Centre (Faculty of Education, Charles University in Prague) analyses existing global activities trying to evaluate higher education institutions.
It provides a description and analysis of methodologies and results of the most famous and most widely used and criticized international rankings. The multi-dimensional typology of Czech public universities and their faculties is also included.