Rankings and the Portrayal of Excellence : The Utilisation of Rankings in Institutional Online Marketing Efforts

Operating under the understanding that competition for resources is increasingly stiff, this study aims to investigate whether and how institutions of higher education utilise global rankings across their websites and provide insight on how institutions share their placement in the rankings with invested stakeholders, particularly prospective students. The sample consists of three higher education institutions who all belong to a consortium of research intensive universities, but come from distinct systems that have varying vertical differences, ranging from highly elite, to middleground and egalitarian levels of stratification. With the goal of including a research focused institution from each of the three varying levels of status hierarchy, data was collected from the websites of University of Pierre and Marie Curie, University of Amsterdam and University of Melbourne, between March and April 2013. The content analysed from each university includes how rankings as an industry are addressed, what sort of language regarding prestige and reputation is used, whether posted rankings accurately reflect the actual institutional placement in the rankings, which rankings systems are used, and how often and at what points rankings are mentioned. The results confirm that rankings do indeed play a part in how institutions portray themselves and indicate that while the three institutions all task themselves with explaining the rankings to site visitors, the praise institutions are willing to give the rankings varies. The results indicate that as far as the cases studied are concerned, the higher an institution is ranked globally, the more the rankings are promoted across the site and the more positively rankings as an industry are presented. When an institution does not find itself at the top globally, but still is at the top within its nation, there is an emphasis on its national status