International rankings

At the UL, in addition to quality assurance, we also pursue a quality enhancement approach that focuses primarily on internal quality development or quality improvement measures. We thus largely rely on the two traditional components of external quality assurance:

• external accreditation and evaluation of study programmes and institutions and
• monitoring the ranking of the University, its study programmes and subjects in global university and subject rankings.

Rankings are based on a set of indicators that assign each university or subject a specific score based on a complex assessment. However, most rankings focus on research indicators as a proxy for assessing overall quality (EUA, 2020).

In the rankings, the indicators are monitored in different ways (public data, surveys, data collected directly from universities) and weighted differently. The number of points and thus the position in the rankings depends largely on the indicators selected, the proportion of the value of each indicator in the total, the statistical method used to process the data and the reliability of the data obtained. For example, if only the value of the one indicators increases/decreases, this can have a significant impact on the ranking position. The methodology of the rankings must therefore be taken into account when interpreting the position and changes in the rankings.