The New World Order in Higher Education

Nine years ago in 2002 there were no global university rankings. There were national rankings in some countries. The only really important one was US News and World Report (USNWR, 2008) which helped to form the national higher education system-market in the United States. Few of the other major national systems saw themselves as a quasi-economic market, and few other systems used public rankings of institutions. Nine years ago there were no significant global research rankings, and measures of publications and citations were left to a few specialists in research policy and management.