V4 University Visibility project with a group of V4 universities aims to conduct university excellence improvement-related research. Eight universities from the V4 region participates in this project. “V4 University Visibility” is mainly a research project that also aims to further develop the partnerships and communication between Visegrád Higher Education institutions. Partners of this project had been carefully selected, from leading technical or economic universities from each V4 country. Project Coordinators in each University are involved to set the baseline of the project, and collect country-specific data, as well as share the gained knowledge in their native language. Main partners from the universities are listed on the page of the universities.

The project is co-financed by the Governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

What is the main issue that your project would like to focus on? What is the current situation that you wish to change?

Nowadays, university rankings have a significant impact on decision-making of higher education stakeholders: students, parents, politicians, also teachers, and researchers. The opinion is widely shared among professionals that higher-ranked universities can attract more and higher quality students (MSC, PhDs) and lecturers, have a better chance of successfully competing in national and international research and development funds, and have more international network opportunities.

The ranking systems are not designed to differentiate among universities in the segment of 1001+ where their ranking measurement tools are not sensitive enough. Universities below 1000 (we call this as “visibility threshold” ) are not positioned precisely. Most of Visegrad region universities now belong to this rank category. This means a so-called “invisibility” at a national level, which means a significant barrier for any further improvement, and it makes efficient governance and management action planning impossible or at least burdensome.

V4 University Visibility project would provide a „magnifying glass”, a recognized ranking position even under the “visibility threshold” of the widely used ranking systems. This project aims to help policymakers, higher education professionals, students as well as parents to make decisions, strategies, or take action.

Provisioned project outcomes

V4 University Visibility as a collaborative project together with a group of V4 universities aims to conduct university excellence improvement related research to an evaluation through the review and analysis of relevant scientific literature related to the field of university excellence and ranking improvement.

We need to gain further evidence about the impact of excellence management and improvement, to map the possible achievements, opportunities, and costs of different ranking positions and improvement. We also plan to collect empirical survey data from Provider (University) Questionnaire Survey established and completed by V4 university representatives, involving all V4 universities.

Dedication of project leader

Obuda University is dedicated to developing higher education excellence thus there have been various projects implemented in the fields of ranking, internationalization, organizational culture, skills development, benchmarking, status quo research. We have made the necessary steps to employ experts in these fields besides providing the appropriate infrastructure to comply with the latest global excellence demands. Obuda University is also keen on sharing the experiences in named fields, and use them for the development of the region, as we believe that after all, Ranking is not a competitive genre, it is about collaboration and improvement, which is impossible without learning from each other, sharing knowledge and best practices.

For more information about International Visegrad Fund please see the website: www.visegradfund.org