Moving to a global stage: A media view

The Times Higher Education Supplement was the first newspaper to publish an international ranking of universities in November 2004 . This article describes the evolution of the international rankings from their origin in a limited peer review exercise through the gradual refinement of a national ranking based on, as far as possible, publicly available, verifiable, and accepted data. The author describes the methodology of the international ranking and presents the case for the integrity of commercially produced rankings, national and international, which can be as objective, robust, and transparent as initiatives from within the university community itself. 1. This article draws on a presentation to the first working group meeting for the project, "Higher Education Ranking Systems and Methodologies: How They Work, What They Do," organized by the Institute for Higher Education Policy and the UNESCO-European Centre for Higher Education, Washington D.C., 10-11 December, 2004.