The Department of Social and Health Services at the University of Applied Sciences Ludwigshafen am Rhein - formerly the Protestant University of Applied Sciences for Social and Health Services - will not participate in the so-called 'University Ranking' of the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE) and the associated data collection in the future. We thus renew and reaffirm the decision unanimously taken by the Convention of the then still independent Ev. Fachhochschule für Sozial- und Gesundheitswesen Ludwigshafen in January 2008. At the same time, we call on the CHE to end its discriminatory practice of not mentioning departments and entire universities that boycott the ranking in its university statistics. Instead of concealing the existence of the critics, we demand that they be listed there with the addition "boycott of the CHE ranking." The past procedure of the CHE does not only lead to the fact that in particular  study beginners are informed incompletely and tendentiously. Thus also important orientation possibilities are missing regarding the choice of study subject and study place. By keeping its critics quiet, CHE also distorts competition between universities and abuses its monopoly position in a way that is questionable from a regulatory and legal point of view.

For the sake of argument

The reasons for our continued boycott remain essentially the same as those underlying the 2008 resolution. The one-sided higher education policy orientation of CHE has not changed. It conveys a concept of education that is primarily oriented toward market principles, but not toward criteria of social usefulness. We reject this. In addition, methodological doubts about the representativeness of the data collected for the ranking and the validity of its interpretation have not been dispelled to date. When the CHE was founded in 1994, the Bertelsmann Foundation and the German Rectors' Conference (HRK) set out to make Germany's universities more market-oriented and competitive. Self-governing public corporations were to become "entrepreneurial universities" that compete for quality and reputation according to the rules of market-based competition. In competition, they should develop their performance, use their resources economically
and organize themselves responsibly.
In practice, this means: Growing intransparency of study opportunities and conditions and inefficient competition on the education market among universities. Democratic structures within academic self-governance are increasingly being replaced by centralized management and directorate structures. So-called university councils, most of which are disproportionately staffed with external representatives from companies and business lobbies, take on central control functions, while it is left to the elected bodies of self-government to manage their tight budgets and compensate for the effects of a lack of staff.

On this march toward the 'entrepreneurial university', the CHE university ranking plays a central and high-profile role. Universities and study programs are placed according to quality criteria in a hierarchical order, which is defined primarily by CHE itself in the course of selecting and interpreting data. These then become 'arguments' in the competition for the 'best' researchers, teachers and students - and for money.

In this way, the CHE ranking contributes to creating and solidifying the differences in quality that are ostensibly being examined: Universities and study programs that are rated negatively run the risk of seeing declining numbers of applicants, receiving (even) less funding as a result - especially in the case of tuition fees - and then dropping again in the next ranking, etc. - an ominous process. The goal of creating comparably good conditions for students at all university locations
is sacrificed to the crude idea of 'education as a commodity'. At the end
there will be some 'excellently' equipped university for a few on the one hand and many on the other hand, which are mainly occupied with managing their destitution and poor study conditions, under which a majority of students and teachers have to suffer.
Methodologically, the lack of transparency of the approach  of the CHE in data collection is to be criticized in particular. For example, there is a lack of information about the sample compositions that are relevant for assessing the  representativeness of the results (e.g., number or socio-demographic structure of respondents). It remains unclear
whether or how evaluation results are included in the ranking where one cannot assume representative results  - for example, due to low case numbers.

Case number problems can occur in particular when parts of the standardized CHE questionnaire cannot be related to the specifics of a university or a study program. In the case of such fit problems, the CHE only provides for the fallback categories "I cannot judge" and "not available". It remains unclear how such answers are included in the evaluation. It is clear, however, that CHE does not provide a real analysis of the causes of qualitative differences between universities. This would require that factors such as the different staffing and financial resources of the universities, their size or the composition of the student body are also considered. Thus, critically socialized students are very likely to be more critical in evaluations  than others with whom they are then compared. In this way, good teaching can possibly be turned against itself.