France Wants a New Ranking System

One consequence of the ranking craze is the proliferation of "minor leagues" as universities and countries that do badly on prominent rankings encourage the creation of more and more indexes and league tables on which they hope to better.

The French Senate is now proposing a new ranking system for European universities. It is not happy with the attention given to the Shanghai Jiao Tong index where French institutions do not perform very well.

The report on the euractiv site continues:

"France's key bone of contention with the Shanghai index is that the number of citations of a institution's scientific research is used as a ranking factor. Paris says this works against countries that do not publish in English.

Senator Joël Bourdin, the rapporteur on the report, argues that the intrinsic value of the Shanghai ranking is highly questionable ["très discutable"] and owes its interest only to its "mobilising effect".

The highest-ranking French university in the 2006 Shanghai ranking was Paris VI in 39th place, while American universities occupy more than half of the top 100. The only European universities in the top 10 are the UK's Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.

While French Higher Education Minister Valerie Pécresse has said she wishes to use the French EU Presidency to "lay down the foundations of common European criteria" for university classification, Bourdin argues that France should already go ahead and develop its own national classification system, as an EU-level process would take years. "


One wonders why the French do not simply use the citations per faculty section of the THE-QS rankings which shows the Ecole Normale Superieure in 4th place just ahead of the University of Alabama (5th), Pohang University of Science and Technology (11th), University of Helsinki (17th), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (20th). On this measure the ecole does better than Princeton, Harvard, Cornell and Columbia.

The report can viewed here.