The role of rankings in the marketing undertaken by universities through their institutional websites”
Any: 2014
Global university rankings have cemented the notion of a world university market arranged in a single “league table” for comparative purposes and have given a powerful impetus to international and national competitive pressures in the sector. Both the research rankings by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the composite rankings by the Times Higher Education Supplement have been widely publicized and already appear to have generated incentives in favor of greater system stratification and the concentration of elite researchers. Rankings of universities have become both popular with the public and increasingly important for academic institutions. This study is an analysis study which is a combination of both qualitative and quantitative study to inspect the role of rankings through applied indicators in the official website of 10 Catalan universities. This paper principally discusses about the rankings role in the marketing strategy of the Catalan universities and how these universities implement international rankings position through their websites to enhance their marketing strategies in compare with other universities. This investigation tries to recognize the significant role of ranking being used in the website of a university by conducting instruments as: guideline analysis of the web page, interviews with university communication and marketing staffs and questionaries from PhD and master students