Higher education rankings : robustness issues and critical assessment : how much confidence can we have in higher education rankings?

University rankings are very appealing, in that they provide one with a single number that allows one, at a glance, to situate a given university in the worldwide context. However, this very simplicity of use can be highly misleading in that most rankings are based on an extremely simple formula that arbitrarily aggregates subjectively chosen indicators. This JRC report has set four main goals: 1. To throw a considerable amount of light on the methodological issues and eventual limitations of the SJTU and THES rankings; 2. To assess the robustness of the two higher education ranking systems with a view to identify for which universities these ranking can be reliably used to draw conclusions; 3. To propose, if possible and despite the known limitations of the currently available indicators in the THES and SJTU, an approach that combines these pieces of information in the least biased way; 4. To identify whether the average European university lags indeed behind the average US university based on the set of twelve indicators of the THES and SJTU frameworks.