The Price of Prestige: Fees and Rankings in European Higher Education

ABSTRACT University rankings powerfully shape strategy and policy, yet they say little about what students pay. This paper introduces a simple, replicable benchmark that juxtaposes posted undergraduate fees with rank positions for 112 European universities listed in both ARWU and THE WUR (2018). Using a combined rank indicator and descriptive comparisons, we show a pronounced decoupling: low‐fee institutions appear span the rank spectrum, whereas many high‐fee providers are not clustered at the top. This pattern challenges the assumption that prestige reliably signals value and offers stakeholders a transparent way to read price alongside position. The contribution is methodological and policy‐relevant: a tractable tool that applicants, institutions, and regulators can adopt to improve price transparency and temper ranking‐driven governance. Although designed as an exploratory case, the approach scales readily to multiple years, programmes, and realised outcomes, paving the way for evidence‐informed evaluations of value for money.