ABSTRACT
Contemporary rankings and league tables2 emerged to address a specific in formation deficit: the lack of public, comparative, quantitative information about university quality and performance to inform consumer behaviour with regard to undergraduate or postgraduate enrolment. Although rankings are typically not intended to inform public policy or institutional improvement, they have had an impact in both spheres through the establishment and legitimation of a measurement framework for assessing university performance, and within this framework, the specification and measurement of university quality and effectiveness. The measurement framework now firmly established by rankings presupposes that the most important dimensions of university activity are subject to valid and reliable quantitative measurement in the form of a small number of measures, that these measures can be weighted and combined into a comprehensive score or rating, and that differences in the summary measure thus produced signify objective and meaningful differences in overall quality. The assessment treats quality as an attribute of the university as a whole. By extension, it implies that (1) quality is experienced uniformly by students attending a given institution and (2) all students attending an institution occupying a particular position will receive an education that is objectively superior to what they would receive at a lesser-ranked institution and inferior to what they would receive at a higher-ranked one.
