Analysis of Systemic Reasons for Lower Competitiveness of European Universities, the Case of Poland

Kazimierz Stępień

Chapter 8 in The University in the Age of Globalization, 2012, pp 179-186 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Globalization has created a new demand for information, because people have access to information on a very large range of products and services on the global market but, because of the great variety of these products and services, they want to be advised about their quality, based at best on a direct comparison. This need has brought about a plethora of competitions, records and rankings of different sorts, with the Guinness Book of World Records becoming the most popular book, known to almost everybody. Higher education institutions (HEI) could not avoid this trend. As a result, several worldwide rankings of HEIs have been developed and made public. Earlier in the 20th century, only local rankings in some countries were prepared; for example, the US Bureau of Education published in the 1930s a ranking of 344 American HEIs. In 2003, the first global ranking of universities prepared by Shanghai Jiao Tong University was offered. It has been published every year since then and has become widely known all over the world. Yet, it has also been sharply criticized due to its specific criteria weighting heavily towards top scientific achievements in the natural and exact sciences, including counting the publications in two respected scientific journals, the British Nature and the American Science. Such a ranking obviously favors US and British universities.

Keywords: Academic Staff; Exact Science; Global Ranking; World Ranking; European High Education Area (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:pal:palchp:978-1-137-02303-2_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137023032

DOI: 10.1057/9781137023032_8

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().