Production of university ranking lists has become a cottage industry. The global picture drawn from such comparisons shows clearly that Europe's higher education system is losing ground compared with its competitor, that of the United States. The growing number of university ranking lists are based on a multitude of methodological approaches, making comparisons between them extremely difficult. Detailed analysis of three international such lists, using elements also from some others, shows that this analytical 'industry' is still far from maturity. Nonetheless, the growing gap between North America and Europe in this field cannot be questioned. If this is really so, the higher-education element in Europe's competitiveness strategy needs to be made a key issue in the Lisbon Programme.
The paper is devoted to the problem of influence of university ranking of contemporary academic policy. The author argues that due to specific indicators, which are used in the main international university rankings, we would observe the temporal and spatial asymmetry of understanding of university mission, especially in elite segment of higher education: the shift to research activities in temporal context and the shift to internationalization in the spatial one. So, the overcoming of these asymmetries is an important task for contemporary ranking theory and methodology.
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