• Korean Journal of Comparative Education
• /
• v.27 no.4
• /
• pp.187-209
• /
• 2017

The purpose of this study was to highlight the necessity of a conceptual reestablishment of world university evaluations. The hitherto most well-known and validated world university evaluation systems such as Times Higher Education (THE), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) or Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) primarily assess big universities with quantitative evaluation indicators and performance results in the rankings. Those Systems have instigated a kind of elitism in higher education and neglect numerous small or local institutions of higher education, instead of providing stakeholders with comprehensive information about the real possibilities of tertiary education so that they can choose an institution that is individually tailored to their needs. Also, the management boards of universities and policymakers in higher education have partly been manipulated by and partly taken advantage of the elitist ranking systems with an economic emphasis, as indicated by research-centered evaluations and industry-university cooperation. To supplement such educational defects and to redress the lack of world university evaluation systems, a new system called 'U-Multirank' has been implemented with the financial support of the European Commission since 2012. U-Multirank was designed and is enforced by an international team of project experts led by CHE(Centre for Higher Education/Germany), CHEPS(Center for Higher Education Policy Studies/Netherlands) and CWTS(Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University/Netherlands). The significant features of U-Multirank, compared with e.g., THE and ARWU, are its qualitative, multidimensional, user-oriented and individualized assessment methods. Above all, its website and its assessment results, based on a mobile operating system and designed simply for international users, present a self-organized and evolutionary model of world university evaluation systems in the digital and global era. To estimate the universal validity of the redefinition of the world university evaluation system using U-Multirank, an epistemological approach will be used that relies on Edgar Morin's Complexity Theory and Karl Popper's Philosophy of Science.