ABSTRACT
As Ellen Hazelkorn remarks in the opening paragraph of her book Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education (2011, 1) ‘the first global ranking of universities was developed in 2003 by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University – and the rest, as they say, is history’. Yet this was no ordinary unravelling of history in the higher education world. Within months of the launch of the Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) in 2003, a major European meeting was told that Europe was not just behind the United States, but also other economies around the world. With only ten European universities amongst the top-ranked fifty (the highest of them in the United Kingdom) compared with thirty-five universities for the United States, Europe’s policymakers released a rush of institutional pronouncements on the need to reform Europe’s higher education systems.
