THES World University Rankings:Criticism And Reference

With social progress and the development of higher education, university rankings as one of the most important form of university social assessment, an increasing number of people likely to pay much attention on the effect of the university rankings in education assessment system. University rankings have intimate connection with interest-related parties, attach highly importance to education assessment system. There are kinds of rankings per year from different education institution, while the problems about rankings are come out gradually. In order to play the function of ranking assessment, more and more experts and scholars devote themselves to the discussion and research of that.Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, via the interdependence in his communication thought among the education field, I innovate a concept "university ranking field". According to the times higher educational supplement, which release the world university ranking per year, I discuss the influence in the higher educational field, including division by geographical position, such as north America, European and Asia; The division of interest-related parties of teachers and students and the relation of the development of each universities. After that I use Bourdieu’s theoretical model to research the world university rankings’ structure deeply, try hard to find production mechanism, autonomy and the special logic for the variation of the index. Then the issue in the field will be found. These problems come form fuzzy division of boundary of university ranking field, vulnerability of complete index system and opaque of information database source. In order to promote our university assessment rapidly, we should avoid the shortage of THE rankings completely, combined with our superiority to design more suitable ranking evaluation mode, to make our higher education move forward to outstanding universities and bring a little theoretical contribution.