Newspapers in Britain and elsewhere are increasingly indulging in an annual exercise that appears in print as various league tables ranking universities, allegedly aimed at informing the decisions that thousands of prospective students and their parents and other advisers will make during the next few months when preparing their applications for admission next year. The league tables tend to take a holistic view of institutions, although some look at individual subjects, albeit often in broad groups that make it difficult to single out the merits of individual courses or departments. There are even league tables that purport to provide a global ranking of institutions or departments. Managers' concerns about their ranking in these league tables are an increasing feature of university life. The tables are perhaps most notable for inconsistency in the data selected by different newspapers for use in calculating their overall result. Most include some evaluation of the quality of teaching and research where these are in the public domain and quantifiable in some way.
展开▼
