World-Class Universities – Consensuses and Divergences

Abstract

Countries that advocate for World-Class Universities consider international university rankings essential for evaluating the performance of their institutions and useful for demonstrating to families, businesses, and society in general the quality of educational offerings, their scientific output, and the reputation of their researchers. These observations, which are increasingly prevalent, have contributed to the emergence of various types of rankings based on different criteria, with international organizations, such as the World Bank, promoting the concept of World-Class University associated with neoliberal policies, a situation that has sparked debate and controversy, generating both consensus and disagreements. This essay aims to discuss the main evaluation indicators of international rankings related to World-Class Universities, problematizing the criteria adopted in these rankings for overvaluing aspects related to scientific production and other indicators of the hard sciences from a quantitative, economic perspective, while undervaluing other qualitative evaluation parameters, underestimating the humanities, and penalizing universities in countries of the southern hemisphere, which are less industrialized and more vulnerable to economic globalization.