U-Multirank: In Trouble Already?

The European Union’s new €2 million ranking system for universities has run into trouble almost as soon as it was launched.

The U-Multirank scheme, which is designed to correct a perceived overemphasis on research in existing international rankings, had its official launch in Dublin late last month. Androulla Vassiliou, the European commissioner for education, said it would give students and institutions a clear picture of their performance across a range of important areas.

But some of the continent’s most prestigious universities have already said they will boycott the project, which relies on institutions to submit data. The League of European Research Universities, which represents 21 leading research-intensive universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, has described the project as “at best an unjustifiable use of taxpayers' money and at worst a serious threat to a healthy higher education system.”

Kurt Deketelaere, secretary-general of LERU, said the organisation had serious concerns about the lack of reliable data for the indicators to be used in U-Multirank, as well as about the comparability between countries and the burden put upon universities to collect data.

U-Multirank will rate universities according to their research reputation, teaching quality, international orientation, success in knowledge transfer and regional engagement. There will be contributory indicators in each area, including graduation and employment rates, and, for knowledge transfer, the number of patents registered and companies started.

All the data will be supplied or checked by universities themselves. The Commission hopes to persuade at least 500 universities to opt into the first phase of the system. Most will be from Europe, with a small number of international institutions included for comparison. The first ranking, which will not be in the form of a conventional league table, is scheduled for early 2014.

The system was devised in collaboration with the Centre for Higher Education Development, in Germany, and the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies, at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands. The EU Commission insisted that a feasibility study undertaken with 150 universities had shown that the concept of a multi-dimensional ranking was realistic.

The project has been allocated €2 million for 2013-14 from the EU education programme, with the possibility of a two-year extension if necessary to establish the system. After that, it must become financially independent.

U-Multirank has met with scepticism in the UK. David Willetts, the Universities and Science Minister, told a House of Lords Select Committee that the project “could be viewed as ‘an attempt by the EU Commission to fix a set of rankings in which [European universities] do better than they appear to do in the conventional rankings”. The committee said the project might be a waste of taxpayers’ money and advised the Commission to prioritise other activities.