Ranking universities based on equity – it is ‘doable’, but is it desirable?

This session presents findings from a research project which aimed to rank Australian universities on their ‘equity performance’; that is, the extent to which they were accessible for, supportive of, and benefiting students traditionally under-represented in higher education. The study comprised a conceptual consideration of how higher education equity might be defined and empirically measured; identification and collation of potential indicators; and the implementation of rankings based on a number of different weighting scenarios. The findings and ranking scenarios from this analysis will be presented in this session. They help to demonstrate the subjective nature of both higher education equity and higher education ranking systems; and subsequently, they help in questioning the desirability of mixing the two.