Akademik Performans Odaklı Uluslararası Üniversite Sıralama Sistemlerinin Genel Sıralamalarına ve Ölçütlerine Göre Değerlendirilmesi

Abstract

International university ranking systems, popular in recent years and increasing in number, are perceived as a sign of quality and are used by universities as an important marketing tool. On the other hand, it is understood that policy- and decision- makers pay attention to the subject, as strategic documents, policies and regulations include articles related to university rankings. International university rankings do not take the community service mission of universities into consideration and focus on research rather than educational mission. Nine research/academic performance based international university ranking systems which produced general and/or criterion-based rankings until 2015 constitute the scope of this study. Similarities of the general ranking lists have been identified in the first phase of the research that is carried out in three stages. In the analyses which were performed in two ways, one according to the ranking systems, and the other according to the years, the results are obtained according to the four similarity measures and visualized through the heat maps.The second phase of the research focuses on ranking position change of the universities in the ranking systems and in this section the ranking positions of the universities are revealed by means of scatter plots. In the third stage, Spearman correlation test and cosine similarity measure were used along with multi-dimensional scaling to examine the similarities and relations of the criteria used within the same ranking system. It has been determined that the general ranking lists generated by the same ranking system are highly similar in every year. THE has the lowest similarity values among the general ranking systems. On the other hand, as a result of comparing different systems that provide ranking lists in the same year, THE and QS are found as the least similar to the others. It is understood that the similarity between the general ranking lists of the same ranking system is higher for the years where the weighted criteria, methodology, data source or criteria are kept steady. The similarity of the ranking systems decreases in parallel with the increasing criteria dissimilarity. The rankings of the same system in different years and the rankings of different systems in the same year have shown that ranking positions changes significantly. It is understood that the years when change in the ranking positions was the most noticeable are the years where ranking systems changed their criteria, methodology, data source, or criterion weights. URAP and THE, which changed mostly in this sense, are the two ranking systems that cause the most sudden changes in university ranking positions. The ranking systems in which the university rankings are the most different from each other are URAP, THE, QS and CWUR. Analyses on criteria have shown that very similar lists can be created with fewer criteria than the ones used in the current rankings. Among the ranking systems which contain university-size dependent measures, it has been found that there is no significant effect of size dependent criteria on the rankings for URAP, while there is for ARWU and NTU. As a result, it is clear that quality of a university can not be equated with the position in the ranking lists. University rankings should not be used to make important decisions without knowing what and how they measure.