Assessing Institutional Reputation Beyond Quality Rankings

The recent massification and globalization of higher education coupled with the changing trends in global economy have seen a surge in benchmarking and ranking practices at the international level. Quality rankings rely on public information gathered mainly from reputational surveys, some input measures, and indicators of research performance. While all these rankings and related indicators have questionable validity as predictors of effective student learning, they have become highly influential on academic behavior, often encouraging institutions to invest time, resources, and effort in improving their rated reputation and image rather than actually improving their academic standards. At the same time, the quality ranking score significantly impacts reputational surveys; reputation is, therefore, both the outcome and the medium of rankings. Consequently, basing the reputation of a higher education institution on rankings and surveys bears several pitfalls as reputation holds many facets, and it would be simplistic to reduce it to one aspect. Nevertheless, universities have a lot to gain from a good reputation (and a good ranking as a matter of fact) and should, therefore, be able to assess it, monitor it, and even control it. The first purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that reputation is not limited to international rankings and surveys. The second one is to propose a list of indicators that higher education institutions can use to assess their own institutional reputation thoroughly, based on objective metrics. Measuring those “reputational indicators” would help identify areas of improvement and serve as a roadmap for institutions wishing to work on building their reputation, monitoring it, and enhancing it.