The emergence of university rankings: a historical‑sociological account

Stefan Wilbers,Jelena Brankovic

doi:10.1007/s10734-021-00776-7

Abstract

Nowadays, university rankings are a familiar phenomenon in higher education all over the world. But how did rankings achieve this status? To address this question, we bring in a historical-sociological perspective and conceptualize rankings as a phenomenon in history. We focus on the United States and identify the emergence of a specific understanding of organizational performance in the postwar decades. We argue that the advent of this understanding constituted a discursive shift, which was made possible—most notably but not solely—by the rise of functionalism to the status of a dominant intellectual paradigm. The shift crystallized in the rankings of graduate departments, which were commissioned by the National Science Foundation and produced by the American Council on Education (ACE) in 1966 and 1970. Throughout the 1970s, social scientists became increasingly more interested in the methods and merits of ranking higher education institutions, in which they would explicitly refer to the ACE rankings. This was accompanied by a growing recognition, already in the 1970s, that rankings had a place and purpose in the higher education system—a trend that has continued into the present day.

Highlights

In accounting for the ubiquity of university rankings, scholars are overwhelmingly preoccupied with “successful” contemporary examples, such as the U.S News & World Report, Shanghai Rankings or QS
As we argue in this article, this understanding of performance was not born in 2003 with the first global rankings nor was it introduced by the U.S News & World Report ranking (USN) rankings in 1983
We started this article with the premise that conceptualizing academic rankings as a social phenomenon that evolved in history would allow us to expose the cultural underpinnings of the rankings’ ubiquity

Summary

Introduction

In accounting for the ubiquity of university rankings, scholars are overwhelmingly preoccupied with “successful” contemporary examples, such as the U.S News & World Report, Shanghai Rankings or QS. To trace the emergence of this understanding of performance in higher education, we analyse the historical evolution of university rankings in the twentieth century. This shift took place roughly during the 1960s and 1970s, and it found a fitting expression in the already existing practice of ranking, which contributed to the further normalization of the idea that performances of higher education institutions could be plausibly quantified, compared and rank-ordered on a continuous basis.

Results

Conclusion