Universities stumped by U-Multirank indicators

Universities are struggling to apply U-Multirank indicators to their own country-specific or institution-specific contexts, which could undermine the comparability of the ranking’s results, a survey has suggested.

U-Multirank compiles information from 44 categories across five areas to produce an international ranking of universities. It allows users to interactively select the criteria they see as most important, rather than producing a table based on absolute positions. The five areas are teaching and learning, research, knowledge transfer, international orientation and regional engagement.

However, in a survey published by the European University Association on 19 February, more than 60 per cent of respondents strongly agreed that applying the U-Multirank indicators to their own institutions, in order to provide the data for the ranking, was challenging.