World university rankings qualify teaching and primarily research

Abstract

From the medieval age university quality has been widely known by writings of students, great names of professors and communiqués of politicians at universities. But since the last quarter of the twentieth century three most influential and widely observed international university rankings qualify and update world's universities annually. The paper presents all three ranking systems in a new structure, their methodology emphasizing performance indicators and aligns top-100 universities. Deviation of university ranks from the reference is also discussed. Regarding the home countries of universities the US is dominant, the UK is the second and then Switzerland, Canada, Australia and Germany follow. In consequence of comparison the today's ranking systems are to be somewhat mono-dimensional since focused primarily on research and do not fully cover teaching and learning quality of knowledge-transfer. Intensive work is therefore in progress to develop a new European university ranking system.