MEASURING INSTITUTIONAL PERFORMANCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: CHALLENGES OF GLOBAL RANKING SYSTEMS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Abstract
The rising world competition in higher educationhas added pressure on the need to have good mechanisms to gauge theperformance of an institution. The global university ranking systems have become powerful instruments of evaluating andcomparing universities in the world, especially the Times Higher Education (THE) ranking systems. This paper intendsto discuss the measurement of institutional performance using ranking indicators, the main issues related to ranking-based measurement, and suggest the way to develop better performance measurement systems in the future. The researchdesign is quantitative and secondary data (THE World University Rankings database) are used in the study. Descriptivestatistics, correlation analysis, trend analysis, and comparative analysisare used to analyze key indicators such asteaching, research environment, research quality, industry income, and international outlook. The results indicate thatthe institutional performance is mainly affected by the indicators that are related to research, especially that of the qualityof research and research environment, and the indicators that are related to teaching and industry have relatively lessimpact. This implies that there is a heavy imbalance in gauging the performance of institutions in terms of global rankingsystems. The paper also points to the failure of the ranking-based assessment, such as measurement bias and lack ofrepresentation of core educational functions. The research suggests more holistic and balanced performancemeasurement models that take into account several elements of higher education based on these findings. The studycontributes to the literature on higher education by providing an empirical test of the merits and demerits of theinternational ranking systems and providing the suggestions on the more comprehensive way of evaluating.
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