The European Union plans to publish a worldwide ranking of universities next year that it hopes will rival existing global league tables. The aim is to boost the place of European universities in the Shanghai Jiao Tong and Times Higher Education ranking systems, both dominated by US institutions.

In the last Shanghai Jiao Tong ranking, the whole of continental Europe had only 23 universities in the top 100. Yet Europe has some 4,000 universities and colleges that enrol more than 19 million students and employ1.5 million staff.

The new European rankings are being developed following acceptance early last year of a tender from a German, Dutch, Belgian and French consortium called CHERPA, a European network of leading institutions in this field.

The group is comprised of the Centre for Higher Education Development in Germany, the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies at the Dutch University of Twente, the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, also in the Netherlands, and the research division INCENTIM at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. The fifth partner is the Observatoire des Sciences et des Techniques in Paris.

The European Federation of National Engineering Associations and the European Foundation for Management Development are also associated with the project. The consortium will use information from 150 higher education institutions around the world during the first half of this year with the initial focus on engineering and business studies.

The 150 must include a representative sample of institutions with different missions in and outside Europe. At least six are to be drawn from the six large EU member states, one to three from the other 21, plus 25 institutions in North America, 25 in Asia and three in Australia.

A release last year from the German centre said the new ranking would avoid the flaws and deficits of existing international rankings "and should provide a valid, fair comparison of institutions".

"The design will follow the Berlin principles on the ranking of higher education institutions which stress the need to take into account of the linguistic, cultural, economic and historical contexts of the educational systems being ranked," the release stated.

The basic approach underlying the project is to compare only institutions similar and comparable in terms of their missions and structures. The project is closely linked to the idea of a European classification ('mapping') of higher education institutions developed by the centre.

"The rankings will be multi-dimensional and will - like the CHE ranking - use a grouping approach rather than simplistic league tables," the release said. "In contrast to existing global rankings, the design will compare not only the research performance of institutions but will include teaching and learning, as well as other aspects of university performance.

"The different rankings will be targeted at different stakeholders: They will support decision-making in universities and especially better informed study decisions by students. Rankings that create transparency for prospective students should promote access to higher education.

A 'pre-final' report on the testing phase is due in November, followed by stakeholder workshops to discuss the findings until April 2011. Thereafter the European ranking system will be finalised and launched.

The commission and a number of EU countries have long criticised the way established rankings are compiled, claiming they are biased and fail to "represent the diverse and multifunctional nature of universities and their research activities accurately".

A study for the commission in 2008 queried the statistics used in the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings and concluded neither the Chinese nor the THE systems were effective in ranking Europe's universities.

"The commission is of the opinion that many existing rankings do not really fulfil this purpose, for example because they focus on research aspects rather than teaching, and on entire institutions rather than programmes and departments," the commission said in a commentary calling for a European alternative to the global league tables.

France has also claimed the selection criteria used in existing ranking systems favoured Anglo-Saxon higher education institutions to the disadvantage of French and other European universities. French Minister for Higher Education and Research Valérie Pécresse made promoting a new European rankings system one of her priorities during France's presidency of the EU in 2008.

EU Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, Maros Sefcovic, told a press conference last November that the European ranking project's so-called "multi-dimensional approach to mapping universities would create a better balance between research indicators and quality of education indicators when it comes to the ranking of universities".

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