Higher education system rankings and benchmarking

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the emergence of higher education system rankings and other frameworks that attempt to make sense of the performance of higher education systems. It starts with a review of higher education system rankings and how they attempt to overcome the failings of institutional rankings. It then covers alternative approaches for monitoring higher education beyond traditional rankings. It introduces the approach of benchmarking higher education system performance rooted in the literature on performance, the performance of public services, and the performance of higher education. It offers a view of what is possible to do with an ontological approach to the performance of higher education systems instead of exercises driven by data availability and discusses the challenges of moving forward with such an approach. It concludes by discussing the likely coexistence of the discourses on world-class university with the world-class systems, and the challenge for countries to balance them. © Ellen Hazelkorn and Georgiana Mihut 2021.