IREG 2022 Warsaw Conference

Academic Rankings at the Crossroads

The IREG 2022 Conference in Warsaw will have a special, jubilee character. A group of international ranking experts (IREG) met for the first time in Warsaw twenty years ago under the auspices of UNESCO CEPES and Kozminski University. Already then, national university rankings played an important role in several countries (Best Colleges by US News, L’Etudiant ranking in France, CHE ranking in Germany, Perspektywy ranking in Poland or McLean’s ranking in Canada). It is important to stress that the IREG meeting in Warsaw preceded the appearance of the Shanghai ranking by a year followed by QS, THE, and other global rankings. This only demonstrates how forth-sighted those experts that met then in Warsaw were.

Global rankings have strengthened as well as proliferated; they became important and influential leaving their mark on higher education. This process, however, have not happened at the expense of national rankings; they not only stood their ground but in general are as important as ever.

Over the time, thanks largely to the appearance of the ever richer and comprehensive data bases academic rankings on all levels have become more sophisticated and influential leaving its mark on higher education. Yet, despite the degree of sophistication, rankings so far failed to measure some essential element of higher education such as teaching.-

The conference in Warsaw will take stock of going on in rankings, will analyze rankings impact on higher education. Over the past 20 years rankings have grown in importance and influence, but they had and still have supporters as well as sceptics, if not adversaries. IREG conferences are open to both.

So much has happened since the last face-to-face IREG conference in Bologna in 2019. The Covid pandemic closed the world for two years, and now, we face the war in Ukraine. These events will have a lasting effect on higher education all over. The phenomenon of internationalization will never be what it used to. Mobility of students may decline or change directions; research cooperation can face new political barriers. All this will impact rankings, too.

Academic rankings are at the crossroads; which way will they go, develop?

The conference will try to answer at least some of the questions:

• How much rankings are helping, and how much they harm higher education?
• What are their strong and weak side as a tool in assessment of higher education?
• How to keep healthy balance between global, regional and national rankings, insuring that each maintains its independence?
• Should the present structure be maintained, where institutions provide data for free to private database owners who, in turn, sell these data back to them?
• Isn’t it time for international organizations such as UNESCO, OECD or the European Commission to create a non-commercial database on higher education?

The IREG conferences have traditionally become a unique and neutral international platform, where university rankings are discussed in the presence of those who do the rankings, and those who are ranked: authors of the main global rankings, university managers, and experts on higher education.

“There is at least one organization that serves as a base for communication among those concerned with rankings, the International Ranking Expert Group (IREG) Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence, which attracts hundreds to its conferences”. Philip G. Altbach in Research Handbook on University Rankings.