Please welcome the new U-Map website which has been publicly launched this month. U-Map functions as a university classification instrument, and is intended to facilitate comparison between universities. The U-Map project was elaborated by the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) and has been co-financed by the European Commission since 2004. Since then, U-Map has gone through six different development stages. After its implementation in 2010-2011 and its launch for the universities of the Nordic states and the Netherlands in the same period, the U-Map tool will now be implemented across Europe and beyond.

Are you wondering which universities offer the most career-oriented programmes with direct links to the demands of the labour market? Would you like to know which universities have the highest percentage of international students? Are you looking for information on universities’ revenue from knowledge exchange activities? If so, U-Map might provide you with some useful answers by identifying university profiles according to a variety of indicators. In fact, whereas its companion project U-Multirank (see ACA Newsletter - Education Europe, February 2013 and June 2013) aims at offering a multidimensional and user-driven approach to establish university rankings based on the selection of available indicators (research, teaching and learning, international orientation, knowledge transfer and regional engagement) chosen by the user him or herself, U-Map does not intend to rank but rather to profile universities. This means that U-Map illustrates universities on the basis of 29 separate indicators grouped together in six categories (teaching and learning profile, student profile, research involvement, regional involvement, involvement in knowledge exchange and international orientation).

U-Map is a useful tool which helps to indicate the strengths of universities according to different fields. Comparably to U-Multirank, U-Map allows to establish a more nuanced approach towards the higher education sector, but does not put emphasis on a hierarchical ranking as such.

U-Multirank

U-Map