Quality assessment and university rankings in Spain

Objectives

The attention paid to international university rankings and the rising interest in the assessment of their quality have put forward demands for new criteria to classify universities and for university rankings in Spain. International rankings usually have two important limitations: they only focus on elite universities and on the role of research, given the difficulty to assess the other two relevant missions of universities, teaching and technology transfer to the environment.

University rankings, as synthetic indicators, face several methodological problems: which activities should be considered, which indicators should be selected, how to measure and aggregate them, which standards should be taken into account, etc. The EUA and the U-Ranking project have cautioned against them in several recent reports. In addition, universities can be assessed from different perspectives depending on whether the user of the information is a student, a researcher, a university manager, a government body or a citizen interested in the situation of higher education.

Despite all these difficulties, university rankings are becoming relevant tools of the evaluation of higher education institutions and to guide decision-makers on them. An important reason for this is that information on universities is difficult to find, to interpret and to compare. Furthermore, rankings outweigh these deficiencies synthesizing their many different aspects and facilitating the valuation, particularly to students who want to choose studies.

This seminar, organized by the BBVA Foundation and the Ivie, aims to assess the available university rankings in Spain, their relevance and limitations, from an international perspective, and to discuss the methodological aspects and findings. Some of the questions to be answered are the following:

• Which are the main methodological problems university rankings face? And how should we address them? What other approaches to the evaluation and classification of universities are recommended?
• Are the results of the rankings focused on research really different from those which pay more attention to teaching or to knowledge transfer?
• Is the size or age of the universities relevant for their position in the rankings?
• Are national and international rankings comparable? Which steps should be taken to achieve a better comparability?

To answer all these questions, the seminar will count on the presence of renowned academics and experts in the construction of synthetic indicators that measure the performance of higher education institutions. The workshop is aimed at researchers in the fields of university rankings and economics of education, university managers, decision-makers on education and research policies and at the general public interested in the evaluation and improvement of Spanish universities.

Programme

9:30 Apertura y presentación

9:45–11:00: Perspectiva metodológica internacional

”Global University Rankings and their Impact”
Andrejs Rauhvargers, University of Latvia y European University Association

11:00–11:30: Pausa – café

11:30–14:00: Rankings de Universidades Españolas

“Rankings de investigación de las universidades españolas”
Gualberto Buela-Casal, Universidad de Granada

“El observatorio IUNE de actividad científica de la universidad española: Una alternativa a los rankings nacionales de investigación”
Elias Sanz Casado, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

“Rankings personalizados: la herramienta U-Ranking para elegir universidad”
Abel Fernández, Ivie

“Ranking ISSUE: planteamiento y primeros resultados”
Francisco Pérez, Universitat de València e Ivie

Coordinators

Abel Fernández, Ivie
Francisco Pérez, Universitat de València e Ivie

Participants

Gualberto Buela-Casal, Universidad de Granada
Abel Fernández, Ivie
Francisco Pérez, Universitat de València e Ivie
Andrejs Rauhvargers, University of Latvia y European University Association
Elias Sanz Casado, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Venue

Fundación Universidad-Empresa, Adeit
Plaza Virgen de la Paz, 3
46001 Valencia