Seeking Excellence, Practicing Rankings, and Aiming at Diversification of Higher Education Institutions’ Mission in the European Higher Education Area [Overview Paper]

Over the past decade or so, higher education has experience a variety of transformations that brought foreword in policy agenda and institutional governance renewed attention to academic excellence and diversification of mission of higher education institutions. Emergence and influence of university rankings, especially the global ones, has been one of the consequences of those paradigm-shifting developments. They respond to the need for evidence-based and accessible to various stakeholders information. The main purpose of this paper is to present and assess how excellence, diversification and university rankings have found its place in the context of the Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area.