National University Rankings ComParative Study Of Index System

Under the circumstance of our popularized high education, the government and non-government institutions lift a boom of High Education Evaluation research in order to satisfying social demand for qualified high education. As a result, various of university ranking lists appear, which has drew great attention from our society and has gradually developed into a essential social evaluation form for our universities. However, as soon as the ranking list published, a variety of debates then come. Among these the indicator systems as the central element of ranking list has become the focus, because whether its setting is reasonable directly decide the reliability of the results of its ranking list.This paper treats the following four ranking lists as its research subjects, that is, Wushulian, Wangda, Xiaoyouhui, and Zhongpingbang, which have widespread impact in our country. It aims to master the research trends of the latest national university ranking lists with the method of textual analysis, and make a horizontal and vertical comparison among these four ranking lists by doing a comparative analysis to analyze their common points and features. Apart from this, it will also focus on the comparative analysis of the development of index systems, the origin of its data, design philosophy, and index weight, and then do a further quantitative study based on case studies of partial universities in Hunan Provence.As the results shows, the main purpose of university ranking lists is to satisfy the requirements of all sectors of society and of each university itself. The reason why there exists an inconformity among the rankings in the four representative ranking lists is that there is a difference among these four subjects referring to the index system, their choice of specific index, and the index weight. Therefore, the difficulty of implement each university ranking list is to determine the specific index and the proportion of its index weight. Furthermore, the unique category and features of each university to some extent lead to the unfair phenomenon of the ranking.By doing a comparative study, this paper concludes that the university ranking lists should make some relevant revolution and breakthrough to promote each ranking lists in providing more practical information of each university and satisfying the requirements of all sectors of society. Firstly, our government should set up statistic system for each university to meet their demand for data. Secondly, it has to cultivate the philosophy of "differentiation" in ranking, and to avoid the concept of only one ranking among all universities. On the contrary, it must set up a ranking lists with diversity based on the specific category of each university. Thirdly, to improve the evaluation index system and index weight, such as, emphasizing the distribution of qualitative index weight, increasing index weight which can reflect students’personal situation, adding the construction of index of per-capita education spending, and evaluation index for employing units.