The article examines the global university reputation race, launched in 2003. Between 2003 and 2010, there appeared a cluster of publications on the qualitative comparative analysis of their methodologies, and since 2010, a cluster of publications on the quantitative comparative analysis of university rankings has started to form. The review made…

While serving as a benchmark of 'world-class' universities, the global university rankings do not include the vast majority of universities. However, "Times Higher Education" developed a Japanese national university ranking table in 2017, which includes approximately 40% of all Japanese universities. This increased coverage of…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) have long embraced a path towards sustainability and engaged in supporting sustainable development. The adoption of the sustainability development goals has forced HEIs to assess how they engage with these goals and how they address societal challenges head on. However, the emergence of sustainability rankings…

Global university rankings seek to illustrate the performance of institutions on an international level and are used by many institutions to help them to reach strategic goals, as such, they have become synonymous to some as an indicator of quality and desirability. As global university rankings become further embedded as a basis on which…

Universities around the world are increasingly orienting themselves towards global engagement in the form of internationalisation. This article examines how the importance of internationalisation and international research collaborations varies across institutions. Using data from the Fourth Global Survey of Internationalisation, it finds that…

Abstract The academic profession is internally divided as never before. This cross-national comparative analysis of stratification in Higher Education is based on a sample of European academic scientists (N = 8,466) from universities in 11 countries. The analysis identifies three types of stratification: academic performance stratification,…

Recently, many universities have drawn attention to world university rankings, which reflect the international competition of universities and represent their relative statuses. This study does not radically contradict types of global university rankings but calls for an examination of the effects of their indicators on the final ranking of…

This article investigates careers of early-career academics in the Russian academic system as it strives to improve its position in the global academic landscape. The typology of "boundaried" and "boundaryless" careers is applied in order to analyze careers in Russia. Two types of academics were identified:…

Cosmopolitanism has been cast by some in recent years as a form of cultural capital, disproportionately available to students on elite educational pathways. This article tests this supposition, by comparing the enactment of global citizenship education reforms at two high-status and two low-status universities in the United Kingdom. These…

In a globalized world, universities face challenges adapting to changing environmental pressures and expectations of legitimacy. Studies on the topic have tended to focus on universities in North America and Europe, while Chinese universities have received less attention, perhaps due to their status as latecomers to global higher education. Based…

A recent editorial in International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education (IRGEE) highlighted an opportunity for the inclusion of geography as a subject in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests. At present, TIMSS tests only encompass mathematics and physical sciences. The IRGEE editors encouraged…

The publication in 2003 of the Ranking of Universities by Jiao Tong University of Shanghai has revolutionized not only academic studies on Higher Education, but has also had an important impact on the national policies and the individual strategies of the sector. The work gathers the main characteristics of this and other global university…

Rankings and online comparison sites have both facilitated and shaped the marketisation of higher education in England, the UK as a whole and elsewhere. They have facilitated marketisation by introducing greater competition between and within higher education institutions. Ultimately, they accomplish the transformation of qualities into…

Equating the unequal is misleading, and this happens consistently in comparing rankings from different university ranking systems, as the NUT saga shows. This article illustrates the problem by analyzing the 2011 rankings of the top 100 universities in the AWUR, QSWUR and THEWUR ranking results. It also discusses the reasons why the rankings…

The outcome of university ranking is of much interest and concern to the many stakeholders, including university's sponsors, administrators, staff, current and prospective students, and the public. The results of rankings presented in the form of league tables, analogous to football league tables, attract more attention than do the processes by…