Abstract
World university rankings are regarded as an important tool to assess higher education quality. There are several media sources that publish world university rankings every year. These ranking results are mainly based on academic indicators, including research and teaching, with different weightings. However, some of these academic indicators are questionable, which affects the objectivity of the ranking results. In addition, conducting more medical-related studies could enhance the research impact scores. Some universities that devote themselves to enhancing these academic indicators lose sight of their original development goals and directions. To make the rankings more comprehensive, it is necessary to consider different viewpoints in the assessment. In other words, the research question of this paper is: whether considering different kinds of indicators can provide better ranking results? Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel ranking approach that combines academic, environmental, and resource indicators based on the Borda count method. The top 100 world universities from the Academic Ranking of World Universities, QS World University Rankings, Times Higher Education World Universities, and U.S. News & World Report are chosen for the analysis. The comparisons between the original and new rankings show that many universities improve in the rankings, while some universities from particular countries drop in the rankings due to the scores obtained from the environmental and resource indicators.
Highlights
Higher education is very important to national economies
This paper aims to combine the existing academic indicators with related environmental and resource indicators to produce more comprehensive rankings
World university rankings are critical to assess the quality of higher education across different universities and countries
Summary
Higher education is very important to national economies. Knowledge-intensive industries have continued to increase in developing and developed countries [1]. The most common core values from university mission statements are research, education, and students [2]. According to Marope et al [3], since many countries have placed great emphasis on knowledge transfer and management, international talent cultivation has become a major education policy. Global universities have to show their international competitiveness to attract potential students. This makes rankings necessary for higher education evaluation and assessment [4,5,6]. Several well-known media sources, such as Times Higher Education World University Rankings, QS World University
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