Europe to Publish Own Ranking of Top Schools
Europe intends to launch in 2010 its own rankings of top universities. The French are behind the initiative to publish via a new ‘Brussels Listing,’ a new international ranking systems of the world’s universities. They hope to thereby better position their school’s graduates on the international jobs market.
Rankings of the world’s institutions of higher learning tend to have the greatest weight for graduates of management schools, medical schools, and law schools, often having a direct correlation on their starting salaries. In fact, many management schools publish data on the average starting salaries obtained by their graduates.
But the rankings of undergraduate institutions carry great weight as well and many US universities cover their expenses with foreign students paying full tuition.
The British started the trend of alternative rankings with the Time Higher Education Supplement’s (THES) relatively impartial classifications; the Chinese, diligent imitators, adopted the idea, publishing their own rankings with the Jiao Tong university’s Shanghai Listing.
The idea is basically that since it’s too great a task to create top educational institutions like the American Ivy League schools – either because of national budgets and priorities or because of political systems antithetical to higher learning and independent thinking – the most effective way to create top educational institutions is to fund an organization that will rank your educational institution as a top school.
The criteria for the new European rankings have yet to be determined but it is likely that more emphasis will be placed on aspects more commonly found in European institutions.
Sarcastic critics of the project say the European Rankings will place greater importance on rote learning and crumbling paint.
In 2003, the Shanghai List of the 500 top universities created a major stir with the Chinese government seeking to position its schools as being world-class. Absurd as that goal may seem in a country where even the internet is censured, the Shanghai listing did succeed in raising the global consciousness of Chinese institutions of higher learning.
In fact, Europe has bristled since the introduction in 1910 of the first rankings in the United Sates measuring excellence in research. Europeans took issue right away with the criteria which were used to build the rankings, and of course there is validity in questioning what criteria are relevant for such a ranking. The criteria retained say much about the culture that produces the criteria.
The Shanghai criteria, for instance, place great importance on scientific research and none at all on quality of teaching, the social sciences, or literature.
In the end, the introduction of still another ranking system is destined to democratize further the choice of evaluating barometer and allow second-rate educational institutions greater latitude for complacent self-flattery. But it will also have ancillary benefits to the cadres of graduating students seeking coming on to the professional job markets of European cities. Their qualifications and CVs will take on greater luster as their degree-granting institutions move up in the rankings.
Graduating job seekers will just need to ensure that recruiters are reading from the same listing as they are.
