The starting point for the development of university rankings could be considered the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century when active discussions on whether eminent performance was a result of environment or heredity were held. In 1910, James McKeen Cattell published a directory of the leading US scientists of that time as well as the higher education institutions where they had studied and worked as teaching staff, ranking those higher education institutions according to their relative number of eminent scientists. The first official national university raking was published in 1983 in the USA by “US News and World Report”, whereas after twenty years, in 2003, Shanghai Jiao Tong University published the first academic ranking of global universities.

Since 2003, the importance of benchmarking higher education institutions has only grown. During the last four years, the general interest increased specifically under the impact of the financial crises, confirming that university rankings enable decision-makers to evaluate which universities have been the most successful and thanks to what means, while the students can ascertain that the university they have chosen ranks among the best in the world and therefore provides potentially better chances of building a professional career.

Although university rankings have been developed and published for years already and their popularity has increased steadily, the stakeholder views on those rankings have always been controversial, often stressing that the development of rankings creates unhealthy competition. Most university rankings highlight the importance of research, particularly focussing on medicine and natural sciences, while neglecting other study programmes of equal significance. Moreover, it has to be noted that research is hardly the only mission of the higher education institutions and the quality of research at higher education institutions bears no direct impact on many students (especially those of the Bachelor degree study programmes). Ranking of higher education institutions based on how “good” they are makes the higher education institutions pay a great deal of attention to ensuring compliance with specific criteria as well as creates a desire “to polish up” the input indicators, thereby compromising the transparency of the university rankings. The fact that three higher education institutions in the USA (George Washington University, Claremont McKenna College, Emory University) had deliberately submitted inaccurate data wishing to improve their standings in the university rankings in 2012 can be quoted as a precedent.

At the conference “Rankings and the Visibility of Quality Outcomes in the European Higher Education Area” organised by the Irish Presidency on 30–31 January 2013 in Dublin officially announced the implementation of the U-Multirank project, a new, interactive and multi-dimensional tool for the benchmarking of higher education institutions. Within the framework of U-Multirank, higher education institutions will be evaluated based on 5 criteria: reputation for research, quality of teaching and learning, international orientation, success in knowledge transfer and contribution to regional growth. It is important that the objective of U-Multirank is not to rank the higher education institutions in another ranking table but rather to provide a multi-dimensional approach to information characterising the performance of higher education institutions. Nevertheless, it has to be noted that the start of the U-Multirank development process has not been deprived of challenges. At the beginning of February, the League of European Research Universities uniting 21 leading universities, including the University of Cambridge, the University of Geneva, University of Oxford etc., announced that they were unwilling to participate in the U-Multirank development, quoting their doubts over the availability of safe and objective data usable as U-Multirank indicators as one of the reasons.

While awaiting the first U-Multirank project results expected at the beginning of 2014, the decision-makers and other stakeholders will have to rely on the existing global university rankings. One of the examples could be the country breakdown of the European higher education institutions included in the Times Higher Education top 400 world university rankings as featured in this infogram.