Abstrakt
The importance of world university rankings is without doubt still growing. This is mainly due to globalisation and economic integration that have been taking place over the last decades, as well as to the gradually increasing interconnection of the EU countries.
Higher education institutions are not only one of major accelerators of such developments but, at the same time, globalisation, integration and interconnection are retroactively influencing them, and gradually changing their characteristics. Despite a number of imperfections and weaknesses, the existing world university rankings are still the only serious attempts so far how to identify, assess and measure the quality of higher education institutions at international level.
Moreover, their methodologies and data collection techniques have been gradually improving, and as they have been updated every year they also provide important and valuable comparisons of development over time. Not only the number of published world university rankings but also their influence on the development of higher education systems and on the behaviour of individual institutions has been constantly increasing.
Therefore, it is not sufficient just to follow the results of institutions in different rankings. It is necessary to take into account the information on the dynamics both general and of individual tendencies and trends, and also to examine particular impact and influence of rankings not only on individual institutions but also on higher education systems and government policies.
Even more, it means that the very dynamic and innovative development of the rapidly changing global quality assessment of universities has to be monitored and assessed very carefully. Our meta-analysis attempts to be the first step in this direction.
Our Cross Ranking of the top world higher education institutions is based on their results in the three most prestigious and influential world university rankings: the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), the QS World University Rankings (QS) and the THE World University Rankings (THE). Since 2012 when first steps to putting together the meta-ranking were taken, the whole process of quite demanding unifying the different names of institutions and linking all three rankings has actually become a learning process, where most links elaborated in previous years serve for updating the Cross Ranking data set in the following year.
We have linked obtained score of individual higher education institutions in all three rankings (ARWU, QS and THE) in order to get substantially more comprehensive data about each institution that correspond to aggregate data from all three rankings. For 2018, data on a total of 1,626 universities were identified and linked.
However, based on this, we can analyse not only current status, but also from 2012 the development of a large number of universities from all over the world, but we also analyse the development of country scores. Both the sum of all college scores from a given country (at least one college in one of the ladders had a total of 97 countries in 2018), and a country-wide score.
The conclusions of these analyses and analyses are very interesting, sometimes approaching our expectations, but sometimes they bring quite new information.