Evaluating the influence of country characteristics on the Higher Education System Rankings' progress Articles uri icon

publication date

  • August 2020

start page

  • 1

end page

  • 15

issue

  • 3, 101051

volume

  • 14

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 1751-1577

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1875-5879

abstract

  • World University Rankings (WUR) measure institutions in different ways. These rankingscan take into account research quality and revenue, surveys of academics and employers,staff-student ratios, and statistics on demographics such as the number of internationalstudents. The Higher Education System Rankings assess national higher education systems,and meet a long-standing need to shift discussion from the ranking of the world's bestuniversities, to the best overall systems in each country. The underlying factors that makea country have the higher number of universities in the World University Rankings is arecent focus of attention and this paper contributes in this matter. We find out that besidesthe country's economic potential, the policy and regulatory environment and the level ofconnectivity of their universities determine the results to become a solid group of best-ranked university system. Moreover, in order to reflect the country's overall performancein world university rankings we propose a new Excellence/Quality indicator based on theexcellence level reached by their Top universities within the Top positions of the WURweighted by the country's size population. For this purpose, the countries with universitiesat the Top 300 positions of the QS World University Ranking 2018 are analyzed

subjects

  • Education
  • Statistics

keywords

  • higher education system rankings; excellence/quality indicators; economic potential; regulatory environment; university connectivity