Rankings to be Investigated

The Guardian has announced that the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) will investigate university league tables, Its chief executive David Eastwood has announced that the council will examine the rankings produced by the Guardian, the Times and the Sunday Times and whether university policies are influenced by attempts to improve their scores.

The report continues:

'World tables compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Times Higher Education Supplement will also be surveyed. The University of Manchester, for example, has made it clear that its strategy is to climb the international rankings, which include factors like the number of Nobel prizewinners. The university has pledged to recruit five Nobel laureates in the next few years.

Prof Eastwood said league tables were now part of the higher education landscape "as one of a number of sources of information available to potential students".

He added: "Hefce has an interest in the availability of high quality useful information for students and the sector's other stakeholders. The league table methodologies are already the subject of debate and academic comment. We plan to commission up-to-date research to explore higher education league table and ranking methodologies and the underlying data, with the intention of stimulating informed discussion.'