ABSTRACT
Over the course of the last thirty years or so, university rankings have evolved from a relatively obscure form of comparison to being a central tool of institutional and governmental strategy with attendant implications for institutional direction, education policy and impacts on institutional funding. Not surprisingly, a great deal of ink has been spilled about university rankings. Much of it focuses on the nature of ranking in respect to repositioning of universities as objects of consumerism and the marketisation of higher education, or on methodological defects of rankings. Very little of it deals with the history of rankings, and almost none of it, bar Ellen Hazelkorn’s book Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle for World Class Excellence (2nd ed., 2015), deals with higher education in truly global terms. For the most part what we have are a series of geographically focused stories (mainly focused on Europe or the United States), plus the occasional piece on specific national rankings which are infrequently brought together in a single helpful volume, for example, the UNESCO Publication Rankings and Accountability in Higher Education (Marope et al. 2013). There is also a literature on international rankings (for example, with respect to the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities or the Times Higher Rankings), but these are rarely historical in nature and tend not to make links to the literature on national rankings.
