Sensitivity of university rankings: implications of stochastic dominance efficiency analysis

Mehmet Pinar, Joniada Milla and Thanasis Stengos

Education Economics, 2019, vol. 27, issue 1, 75-92

Abstract: To create their rankings, university-ranking agencies usually combine multiple performance measures into a composite index. However, both rankings and index scores are sensitive to the weights assigned to performance measures. This paper uses a stochastic dominance efficiency methodology to obtain two extreme, case-weighting vectors using the Academic Ranking of Worldwide Universities (ARWU) and Times Higher Education (THE) data, both of which lead to the highest and lowest index outcomes for the majority of universities. We find that both composite scores and rankings are very sensitive to weight variations, especially for middle- and low-ranked universities.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09645292.2018.1512560 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:edecon:v:27:y:2019:i:1:p:75-92

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CEDE20

DOI: 10.1080/09645292.2018.1512560

Access Statistics for this article

Education Economics is currently edited by Caren Wareing and Steve Bradley

More articles in Education Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().