Five hundred universities from around the world, including universities in Romania, have been invited to sign up for inclusion on the U-Multirank listing to be completed early 2014, according to the European Commission (EC).

“The new listing, U-Multirank, will differ from existing rankings by rating universities according to broader range of performance factors […] : reputation for research, quality of teaching and learning, international orientation, success in knowledge transfer (eg partnerships with business and start-ups), and regional engagement,” reads the press release.

The EC performed a selection process aiming to build a consortium of independent organizations that would carry out the listing. Thus, the Centre for Higher Education (CHE) in Germany and the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) in the Netherlands will be in charge of the U-Multirank project. The Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University (CWTS), academic publishers Elsevier, the Bertelsmann Foundation and software firm Folge 3 will act as partners.

“This will be a modern and sophisticated ranking, capturing the full diversity of higher education. Existing international rankings still tend to attach too much weight to research reputation,” said European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth Androulla Vassiliou. “[…] U-Multirank will help young people make the right study choices and it will motivate institutions to improve their performance across a whole range of activities. It will also be a useful tool for decision-makers, enabling them to be better placed to develop effective higher education strategies for the future.”

The EC also announced that an alternate U-Multirank listing will be based on higher education beneficiaries’ own selections.

U-Multirank is to be officially launched on January 30-31, 2013, at a conference held in Dublin under the Irish Presidency of the European Union. The project is to receive EUR 2 million of EU funding from the Lifelong Learning Programme, with provisions for two extra years of seed-funding until 2016 in place.

The U-Multirank initiative dates back to 2008 when the French Presidency of the European Union suggested that a new university ranking should be created via a multifaceted methodology. CHERPA, a consortium of higher education and research organizations, was then assigned the task of carrying out the U-Multirank feasibility study by the European Commission. In 2011, the study was completed and a confirmation was given that the ranking could be put into practice.

Ioana Jelea, ioana.jelea@romania-insider.com

(photo source: sxc.hu)