GYA members participating in the CoARA TURN Working Group have contributed to a new publication titled “More Than a Number: Six Myths about Rankings and the Choices of Students and Early-Career Researchers“, a critical framework that can be used in higher education sociology and policy to challenge the over-reliance on institutional global ranking systems.
The document’s Summary reads as follows: “It is commonly assumed that university rankings guide students and early-career researchers to the best institutions and expand their opportunities. This brief tests six such widely repeated claims against two sources: the research literature, and first-hand perspectives written by early-career researchers across eight world regions. Both sources converge: rankings are one information channel among many, poor guides to academic fit, and no measure of the work that matters most locally. Far from levelling the playing field, they reinforce inequality, and, embedded in scholarship, visa, and hiring policies, they carry real consequences for those with the least power in the system.
The CoARA TURN WG seeks to promote an understanding of university rankings among stakeholders that is informed also by growing research and empirical evidence on the problem. The publication highlights how aggregated commercial data can distort the decision-making of students and early-career researchers (ECRs).
The publication’s framework systematically deconstructs six pervasive myths regarding how rankings affect academic trajectories, such as “The Myth of Perfect Information”, “The Myth of Global Mobility and Uniform Intent”, and “The Myth that Institutional Rank Dictates ECR Success”.
GYA alumna and Immediate Past Co-Chair Yensi Flores Bueso (University College Cork, Ireland) commented that “Rankings reward what is visible or relevant to a few, not what builds professionals who solve local problems. This brief centres the voices of ECRs from regions rankings tend to render invisible.”
Further members of the authorship team included GYA Executive Committee member Carina Geldhauser (ETH Zurich, Switzerland), Executive Committee member Reem Abou Assi (Al-Qabas Private College, Iraq), Jelena Brankovic, and Malika Karieva.
The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) is a collective of organisations committed to reforming the methods and processes by which research, researchers, and research organisations are evaluated.