U-Multirank aims to improve HE, not sell newspapers

By Jordi Curell. Is Times Higher Education worried about competition to its world university ranking from U-Multirank? It looks like it from the tone of its reporting on the new European ranking initiative launched in Dublin at the end of January.
Let us hope not, though – because this should not be a question of competition, but rather of greater transparency in the performance of higher education systems and institutions. The European Commission has launched a new multidimensional ranking, which will allow stakeholders to get a clear picture of performance across the full range of institutions, highlighting excellence in all the different missions of universities – in teaching and learning, in knowledge transfer and regional development and in internationalisation, as well as in research. The preparatory study on U-Multirank showed that a multidimensional ranking is feasible. Now is the time to implement it. At the European Union (EU) presidency conference in Ireland at the end of January, stakeholders agreed that U-Multirank had now entered the implementation phase. Read more...