Project aims to improve global reputation and rankings

In September 2017, President Jamie Cassels launched a Global Reputation and Rankings Project to ensure that UVic’s global impact is being accurately assessed by international university rankings such as QS and Times Higher Education.

World rankings play a key role in attracting talented and high-quality faculty, students and staff to UVic, and influence perceptions of the quality of teaching and research at universities. They also reinforce the value of UVic degrees for graduates and inform the choices to engage our university by potential partners, governments and other decision-makers.

With heightened competition in the sector, universities must take an increasingly proactive role in ensuring they’re being properly assessed by the ranking agencies.

Since the fall, a project team led by Vice-President External Relations Carmen Charette and project manager Tony Eder (executive director, academic resource planning) has been working with Illuminate Consulting Group (ICG) to help UVic identify ways to optimize the university’s participation in rankings processes.

“Our aim is to improve the university’s international standing by ensuring that our rankings submissions are complete, comprehensive and in line with post-secondary education best practices,” says Eder. “We’re looking at how to align our data practices to optimize our performance on the measures used by ranking agencies.”

In phase I of the project, ICG worked with the steering group that includes academic, research and administrative leaders on a rankings capability strategy, to determine where UVic’s ranking submissions could be improved. The first phase also included UVic’s first set of outreach communications to international partners, to encourage participation in reputation surveys.

Phase II will focus on further development of a reputation enhancement strategy that will highlight UVic’s impact and influence as a high-quality and dynamic research institution, and develop a long-term reputation-building roadmap within the landscape of global reputation surveys.

“It takes years of consistent, dedicated effort to move the reputational dial in international rankings,” says Eder, “but we’re confident that the work we’re doing now will pay off in the long term.”

Key findings will be communicated when the project wraps up in fall 2018. Learn more about UVic and rankings.