Research Areas

The purpose of this project financed by the BBVA Foundation is to build a system of performance indicators of Spanish universities of wide coverage, rigorous in its approach and properly framed in the international initiatives in this area: the Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) led by the OECD, the International Ranking Expert Group (IREG) founded by the UNESCO European Centre for Higher Education (UNESCO-CEPES) and the EUA Rankings Review Report.

In March 2016, the results of the fourth edition of this project were presented and the updated data was made available on the U-Ranking website. The ranking covered a total of 61 universities (48 public and 13 private). This edition has been the first to look at how the performance of the public university system has evolved, based on results obtained in the four editions of U-Ranking. A section of the 2016 report also categorizes universities into homogeneous groups according to the characteristics of teaching staff and students, their size, organizational complexity, financial resources, and the environment they operate in. In other words, it identifies strategic groups of universities. The authors then consider whether the universities categorized in any of these groups consistently occupy higher or lower positions on U-Ranking.