Ranking world top institutions since 2004
The QS World University Rankings® currently considers over 2,000 and evaluates over 700 universities in the world, ranking the top 400. Plans continue to broaden the work in terms of number of institutions and deepen it in terms of the detail provided to users.
Methodology
Six indicators are drawn together to form an international ranking of universities:
40% |
ACADEMIC REPUTATION from global survey |
|---|
10% |
EMPLOYER REPUTATION from global survey |
|---|
20% |
CITATIONS PER FACULTY from SciVerse Scopus |
|---|
20% |
FACULTY STUDENT Ratio |
|---|
5% |
Proportion of INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS |
|---|
5% |
Proportion of INTERNATIONAL FACULTY |
|---|
In addition, rankings in five broad faculty areas are produced: Arts & Humanities, Engineering & Technology, Life Sciences & Medicine, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences & Management. These are based entirely on the results of our global academic survey unlike the more sophisticated approach taken to derive the QS World University Rankings® by Subject
Format
The QS World University Rankings® can be found online at www.topuniversities.com. They also receive significant coverage in many national and international newspapers and media channels including the Guardian, BBC News, the Sunday Times, US News & World Report, Chosun Ilbo, Al Jazeera, sina.com and The Times of India.
Publication date
Published annually in September/October
For complete information on the QS World University Rankings® , including detailed explanation of the methodology and the full tables, please visit http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings
How does QS choose which university to include in the ranking? If a university wants to be assessed, what are the steps to be done?
It very much depends on which particular ranking you are referring to. The subject rankings are based on a survey of academics and employers and citations per paper. Qualifying institutions have to be producing a threshold level of research in the discipline and offer programs therein. The first and most important step is to make sure you are listed. For this you can write to Baerbel Eckelmann on baerbel@qs.com – she will check your records and make sure you have access to our data system QS Core. Regardless of whther you feature in our rankings, every university is entitled to a profile on our website. THis will enable you to supply a range of data about your institution and we can assess the best next steps from there.
What is the correlation between the overall score for a university, and its QS Star rating ? For example, the universities marked in positions 5, 6 and 7 in the world, each with scores over 97%, have NO stars ???
Is the star system an opt-in mechanism for which a university has to volunteer, and some top unviersities do not so choose ?
best wishes
Chris
Hi Chris, Thank you for your comment. The QS Stars system is indeed an opt-in system that a university chooses to participate in, QS Stars is a broad based evaluation system designed to evaluate universities using more comprehensive indicators in addition to those used in the rankings. Many universities have chosen to be audited by the QS Stars rating system, however some of the top universities that you have mentioned have not yet been rated.There is no correlation between the rankings score and rating results. For more details, please go to http://www.topuniversities.com/qsstars , there you will find more details on the evaluation, the methodology and you will be able to see the results of many other QS Star rated universities.
Thanks,
Deena
Many thanks Deena!
How much does have a University to pay for participating in the survey?
There is absolutely no fee for institutions to participate in the QS World University Rankings. If you represent an institution that is not currently featured then contact us and we look at each individual case on its merits. Our intention is to apply our methodology as evenly and fairly as possible to deliver as accurate results as possible. Our lists are reviewed annually and this year over 70 new institutions have been featured.
Portion of ACADEMIC REPUTATION is too high. And unfortunately, this point comes only two large global surveys – one of academics and another of employers. It’s only survey, not the real fact.
Actually in campus, you have to emphasize the product of research output such as paper publish, citation, invention award/medal, etc.
Academic reputation tends to value based on ‘famous’ not the real quality. So, we can see many of universities in your range rank 200-400,actually they do not deserve to occupy that position.
You can learn from arwu.org, how they use their methodology.I think it is better methodology.
You can also check with microsoft system.I give you one example in this link :
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Comparison?entitytype=7&id1=13173&id2=1421
You can check in your rank, you will seee in in your rank get 100-200.microsfott shows that university has a bad quality. Also in arwu not in big 500.
So, it makes me one conclusion, your methodology emphasize “the famous university” not the real quality. SO, I always seldom use your rank as reference.
People will choose what ranking they use based on what they consider important. We understand that. For some, the research metrics will be key and for others reputation will be a critical factor. The link you provide shows a publication comparison between universities of Notre Dame (223) and Mahidol University in Thailand (228) and your commentary argue that the latter oughtn’t be there and on this evidence alone the argument is difficult to refute. However, universities are about more than just research and the context in which a university exists also plays a part – as do their characteristics and revenue. Preparing a world university ranking that is dominated by US institutions because they have more money, a longer history and decades of ‘publish or perish’ makes little sense to us either. How much research is published in languages other than English, for example? Why not use the rate of growth in output as an indicator – one in which these two institutions would compete? Or impact on national scientific progress – one in which Mahidol would undoubtedly excel.
We hear arguments that survey metrics are “too subjective” all the time, but ultimately all measures are subjective as they are selected and weighted on a subjective basis. None more so perhaps than Nobel Prizes where only just over 800 people have ever received one (including literatire and peace), they are awarded based on the selective judgements of a panel of experts and to derive worthwhile data have to embrace results that are a century old. Our ranking is designed for prospective international students and we know many of them find it enlightening and helpful to identify institutions of strength that they may not otherwise have known of. In that context it still concludes that the US has the world’s leading institutions. Ultimately rankings should only be considered as part of a mix of sources and we actively encourage people to think for themselves and take the results for what they are.
This is a terrible survey. No comment on the top schools, they really are top schools, but a survey that bases 50% of a score of quality on “reputation” indices is really poorly conducted. Maybe the QS folks should ask some of the university folks to prepare the next survey…
Obviously there are diverse opinions on this matter but since initiating this work we have engaged with representatives of universities and taken on input and feedback on over 150 separate occasions at events attended by an estimated 2,000 representatives of universities. We also have an academic advisory board involving over 20 academic leaders who advise on and inform the development of our methodology. These results have been developed in close collaboration with universities worldwide.
Furthermore, it is a ranking designed for prospective international students, amongst whom international reputation is a key consideration when taking a decision that may shape their careers. We recognize that their are aspects of university strength that we have yet been able to involve in these headline tables and are working on a program of continuous imporvement to do more at a regional and discipline level.
The statistical validity of our reputation surveys, however, is ironclad and far better than many surveys and polls upon which arguablly more important decisions are based. Our academic reputation measure, for example, involves the opinions over 33,000 individuals gathered within the last 3 years contributing over 350,000 individual statisitical observations. By contrast, for example, only 816 individuals have ever received a Nobel Prize over its 110 year history.
If you are interested in the reputation of schools, than that idea should transpire in the title of the survey. This is not a “World University Ranking”, but rather a “World University Reputation Ranking” and the idea that reputation makes up for 50% of the score should be part of press releases and press clippings.
A study that truly tests university quality would look at factors such as test performance and learning in different areas, entry into graduate school, employment, student satisfaction with programs. A pre-post design, where you control for socioeconomic status might be nice too, given that the better students, most well off, enter the better schools. This kind of study would allow us to rank universities as a function of student success and learning, which is, I think, what you really want to know when you look into these surveys. Schools have this data available.
Imagine a student who decides to go to East Cupcake University because it actually had the best learning environment or provided the best professional training or research context. It seems to me that this is the kind of information you want to be giving people. Saying that people are interested in school reputation kind of implies that it doesn’t really matter what they learn, which I realize is not really what you want to say here. Most of all, it should be clearer in the title of the survey.
You might want to put out statistics from your own survey with different weightings to help people understand what the data say. So what happens to rankings when student-teacher ratios are given more strength? or faculty citations? 50% reputation is a lot to give and one might presume, with good chance of being right, that schools that are more expensive, older, that are in high profile population centers, have been seen in films and television shows, are rated most highly.
“This kind of study would allow us to rank universities as a function of student success and learning, which is, I think, what you really want to know when you look into these surveys. Schools have this data available.”
Errr… no they don’t.
You are right – we would very much like to look at student success and learning and we have some initiatives running to test aspects of it, but, frankly very few institutions have good data available here. Sure in the US, UK and Australia we would do fine, but in other countries there is no chance. We have been doing this for eight years now and I can tell you from personal experience that it is beyond difficult to get the number of students from some universities let alone any more detailed data.
As for releasing statistics form our own survey with different weightings – this we already do through our scorecard – currently a first effort based on last year’s data but is currently undergoing update and enhancement.
Can you start qs star rankings for Canadian Universities?
I’m interested in Canadian Universities but noticed the site does not have too much info on them.
requests:University of Guelph,University of Toronto,Waterloo University.
I would also be interested in this.
Also is I saw this post on facebook but are there any ranking for the categories of Veterinary Medicine, Microbiology, and Molecular Biology and genetics?
Just for the sake of argument isn’t academic reputation weight a bit too high? this way other rising universities will not be recognized?
We expect to be able to release more subject area lists in the future but it is unclear whether we will have the necessary data to go to the level of detail you are looking for. We have a “Biological Sciences” table if that helps.
In your second point, it seems not to bear out. HKUST for example was founded in 1991 and came top in our QS Asian University Rankings this year and places 40th on the global table. Overall the top universities in our lists got younger on average between 2010 and 2011.
Thanks for taking the time to answer. But I suspect that schools in Canada, Switzerland, Japan, and Germany might be able to put up reliable information in this regard as well. So, most of the top schools in your survey could be part of a more valid survey.
My thought is that, in the least, it might be helpful to change the title, otherwise it looks like you are assessing quality, not reputation. I admit that the two are correlated, and I really do not question the quality of the schools that are well ranked, but that is not how the survey is done. You could also change the weighting given to reputation. 50% just looks like it drives the data.
No problem at all – it’s good to get a little debate going. Sure I gave the US, UK and Australia as example countries and the others you list may be similarly well equipped – although trying to standardize and compare would most likely be tricky. However, 50 countries feature in our lists, and the same cannot be said for India, Greece, Ecuador or Egypt (for example).
We could change the weightings – but out of our current datasets very little lends itself to being the beneficiary of reallocated weight. To be sure, should we find ourselves in a position to apply additional metrics in the student success or learning areas reducing the weight on surveys would make sense. Having said that, institutions would then lose their ability to track trends over time, which increasing numbers of institutions are doing since this is one of the longest standing global rankings.
As to a name change – since QS World University Rankings is a registered trademark and we do embrace metrics that are not reputation led – citations, faculty student ratios and international factors – this is not something we are likely to consider. The weightings and criteria used are well documented and sent out in the boiler plate of every press release we dispatch.
We are working on ways to balance the data against other key information – such as fees data published alongside this years results and classifications which will shortly reappear.
None of these rankings are perfect – nor are they likely to be, selection of indicators and wightings are inherently subjective – for every critic of our approach I can find a critic of the Shanghai rankings or US News. I have written numerous posts on this very subject and wherever possible we take pains to point out what we are measuring and for what purposes the results may be appropriate.
In a national ranking made by german news magazine DER SPIEGEL a few years ago, which basically measured student’s satisfaction with their university, satisfaction with resources/equipment provided and ratio of students per professor/teacher, the University of Hamburg was at the bottom of all 66 german institutions (incl. 2 other universities from Hamburg) measured.
And I have heard stories of students from Hamburg who preferred to to commute 100km daily to the University of Bremen (in this ranking quite a few places below Hamburg university), which was better equipped in the natural sciences.
Different rankings, different criteria, different times, different results. We actively encourage people to not only look at these results and to take into account what is actually being measured. Student satisfaction is an important criterion and one which often yields results that differ from traditional thinking. You might take a look at http://www.topuniversities.com/scorecard and see how the results fall out with different weightings applied – our new results will be fed into this system soon. We realise that different things hold different levels of importance for different people and that the results we actually publish are only one interpretation.
Are there any plans for QS star rankings for Canadian Universities?
Hi Jake… QS Stars are an opt-in inititative involving a much deeper audit across more than 30 indicators. This takes time – both to encourage institutions to get involved and conduct the process. Canada is a priority for us and we are beginning to initiate dialogue with some of the institutions there, but it will take some time before any results start filtering through.
thanks for the reply Ben!..I look forward to seeing the results in the near future
Is this going to be the same methodology used for next year?
if ACADEMIC REPUTATION from global survey is weight 40% I doubt rankings will even change that much in 1 year
Also I can’t locate ranking for veterinary medicine schools? where can I find this
The list is for Computer Science and Information Systems – LSE does have active programs in the latter – http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/informationSystems/
I was looking at the rankings for Computer Science, and I noticed in the list that London School of Economics was in there. How did they get a score when they do not deal with computer science? Thanks.
I am not sure wether this would be the same case, but… the University of Barcelona (UB) appears as the top one Spanish institution in “Computer Science & Information” and it ranks 51-100 world wise. We do have a “Computer Enginneering” degree managed mainly from our Faculty of Mathematics but most of the performance results and the final reputation that we obtain in this scpecific discipline becomes mainly from some other specific master courses and doctorate programmes which are usually related to different subjects such as Biohealth computing, Computational & Applied Physics, Computational Chemistry, etc…And not only those for experimentals sciences: in the UB there are also quite a lot of courses and programs in Social and Educational Sciences & in Humanities which include in their teaching & research computational trainning and development.
So, I do not know much about LSE’ programs but I am sure that one university can score perfectly in a subject or discipline even if they are not apparently dealing with it.
Clearly in the research and reputation metrics a university can gain credibility in a discipline where they may not operate programs. However, we do screen institutions to make sure relevant programs are offered. What constitutes a relevant program can of course be debated, but from our perspective those listed above would qualify – we don’t want to get into a semantic debate about what the difference is between Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Information Systems for example.
UK Universities rank very well here. How can this be reconciled with the news we are fed all the time, that UK schools and kids are declining in standards and that the UK has a pretty poor education system in comparison to many European countries. So schools are terrible, but once the same kids come out of university they rank as some of the best educated kids in the world?
Any comments?
Well, UK universities are amongst the most popular in the world for international students – LSE has well over 60% – so even if we accept your hypothesis it is not necessarily the same “kids” we are talking about in both contexts. Many university programs include levelling courses in the first year that are designed to bring anyone not at the necessary fundamental level in say, mathematics, up to the prerequisite standard for the program which may serve as partial compensation for declining standards in schools. Of course, much of this is difficult to navigate, since against the backdrop of these declining standards is set the reality of over 25 years of improved A-level pass rates.
Of course a gulf in standards between school and university is not a phenomenon restricted to the UK – it is probably nowhere as profound as in the US where SATs for example seem comparatively trivial next to tests set for kids of a younger age in the UK – yet their universities lead the world.
Furthermore, of course. Whilst we would love to get deeper into the relative quality of education at world universities, strength in research is not necessarily wholly correlated with the impact of the student experience.
Arizona State University was ranked 21 in the Life Sciences. This was based on scores of 16.5 in the Academic category, 7.3 in the Employer category, and 100 in the Citations category for an overall score of 49. Is the very high score of 100 in the Citations category correct? If so, could you explain why it is so high. For example, is it due to a few papers (or a few faculty) with a very large number of citations?
The short answer is yes, In fact the same is true in the case of Tokyo Metropolitan University. There are a small number of papers with an exceptionally high number of citations, which skews tha average somewhat. Obviously this year was our first effort at breaking things out to a discipline level and we are now modelling some refinements for next year which may inhibit the influence of such outliers.
Ben,
Thanks for your quick response.
I assume that the outlier is the citation of the MEGA software by Kumar (Arizona State Univ) and Tamura (Toyko Metropolitan Univ), correct?
If this is not included, what is the score for ASU Life Sciences? Of if other citations of software use by Kumar are not included, what is the score for ASU Life Sciences?
How would you plan to refine the score in future years so that such outliers do not have such an inordinate influence?
Thanks,
Phil Hedrick
Well, the analysis is quite involved – we are not likely to arbitrarily discount a single paper but seek to apply a filter or weighting based on some form of rule based criteria and since scores are relative its difficult to predict without re-running everything exactly what the effects would be. One proposal on the table is to apply greater weight to journals where ONLY the subject in question is the focus – at the moment equal weight is placed on a dedicated journal as to one that may feature papers in a range of related fields. Another proposal is to either filter out or apply a lower weighting to papers authored by representatives of more than, say, five or ten institutions – as whilst we don;t want to discourage collaboration such works can often infer significant credit upon a co-author that may have barely touched the work. Whether either of these suggestions would directly influence this particular case is unclear to me without me going and having a more detailed look at it. We now have all of the data we need to model these ideas and ultimately publsih the next batch of results, so will be working over the next couple of months with a view to publish slightly earlier – in the first quarter of 2012.
Why doesn’t QS use a more comprehensive indicator…such as Microsoft academic search..In my opinion it provides more useful information for students because certain categories are much too broad.
Microsoft academic search “http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=7&topdomainid=4&subdomainid=0&last=0&continentid=2″
shows publications and citations for areas including;Economic and business, molecular biology and genetics, biochemistry, microbiology etc..it’s updated weekly and new categories are being added shortly including animal and plant science etc.
SciVerse Scopus is more established, widely referenced and acknowledged as an authoritative source of abstract and citation data. Microsoft Academic Search is still labelled as BETA. We are not trying just to rank by citations either – for that one could use Scopus directly, or Google Scholar. We feel the mix of indicators we are using present a more balanced picture of institutional strength and it is the reputation data as much as the citations data that constrain the level of granularity to which we are able to go. Although, record response numbers in 2011 should facilitate more subject areas in 2012.
I wasn’t aware that it was beta, thanks Ben! for clearing that up.
Good to hear that more subject areas will be taken into account.
For some universities , the ranking is going through a gradual declination like university of new south wales(UNSW) , what do you believe the most significant reason is for this declination?
The world is changing, and quicker than some commentators seem willing to admit. Amongst the top 200 universities there has been an average increase in international enrolments of 6.8% in the last year alone. The growth in research productivity in certain areas (most notably China) over the past five years verges on meteoric. Total student volumes are growing and growing fast upsetting Faculty Student ratios. It is important to remember that rankings are relative – we might consider talking less about the supposed decline of an institution like UNSW and more about the rise of the institutions that have displaced them. Two of the three institutions that overtook UNSW this year are Chinese – Peking and Tsinghua. We know from first hand experience and other evaluations that UNSW is an excellent institution, constantly on the move and improving – but it is difficult to compete with the leverage behind the leading Chinese institutions at present.
I was wondering if Universities have to pay for each star? I understand that they do not have to pay to be in the survey but what about gaining stars? Thanks
The QS Stars audit is a much more in depth examination of each institution involving additional resources for each participant so, yes, there is a fee applicable. However, institutions don’t “pay for each star” so much as pay for the evaluation and get whatever result shakes out.
Is AACSB accreditation a criteria in the rankings of business schools?
We didn’t include a business subect area in our subject rankings and business schools are not the focus of the QS World University Rankings. You may be referring to our Global 200 Top Business Schools which are presented in regional list form and are based purely on our global survey of employers. We are in the process of devising a version of our QS Stars evaluation for business schools, and that certainly looks at AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA accreditations of business schools.
I think the NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY WARANGAL, INDIA (NITW) is not included in the rank list. I would appreciate it. Its ranked with the INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY in India (IITs)
Please try to rank them also. Especially under the Engineering and science field. Because I think this institute hold a pretty good position in world.
Thanks for the observation. We will look into it.
Is a joke? ACADEMIC REPUTATION 40%….Come on!!!Surely the citation is much more important than reputation. What means reputation? University has a very good marketing sector?
Academic Reputation is based on a global survey involving almost 34,000 responding academics. It is language and discipline independent. Effective marketing can certainly influence reputation but the quality needs to be there too. BMW have a good reputation not only because of their marketing department but also because they make good cars. Citations are, broadly speaking, an English language phenomenon and are difficult and perhaps impossible to apply fairly across disciplines without introducing arcane, subjective and impenetrable data manipulation.
BMW have a good reputation in terms of what? I drove a BMW, it was a fun car to drive, very driver-oriented, and the controlling was excellent, but that’s it. It breaks all the time. Well, that’s what BMW appeals to me base on my previous experience, but it does not represent what the car is right now.
I guess there’s a misunderstanding of concept going on here, what you mean here is “appeal”, not “reputation”, BMW appeals to a lot of people because it is fancy, and because it is expensive, because people think you are rich to drive a BMW.
The “reputation” in this Survey is unreliable because you have only 34,000 respondents, and I believe if you dig deeper, you will find out that most of the people who took the survey are in the age group of over 45.
A lot of schools have improved academically over the last decade, but still gets a low rank; schools that are doing bad right now is actually pretty high in ranking (40-70), the result of this ranking is like dated 15 years ago, do you do any quality check before posting this ranking?
We ask academics to comment on the reputation for research of institutions in the fields they know about. The fields in which they are active, reading and publishing and citing research themselves. This keeps the system relatively current – particularly in contrast to, say, the Shanghai approach, which draws on Nobel Prizes awarded as long ago as 1901. We have a range of detailed quality controls in place.
Dear Ben, in Argentina there are public universities and private universities. Public universities receive financial resources from state. And private universities are held only with their own financial resources. Therefore, the differences between Argentine universities, and their potential for growth and expansion will be subject to their financial status. Data from economic and political context should be present in an international ranking.
Argentina is not unique in this. A ranking is built from indicators selected based on consultation with experts on stakeholders. We gather the data to popoulate those indicators and some institutions do well and others do less well. In one country the results may reinforce the intuitive status quo – in another they may do the opposite. Receiving funding from government is not a measure of institutional quality, the impact of what is done with the funding may well be. In many cases the traditional considered pecking order of institutions in a country can be grounded in history, reputation and tradition rather than excellence in research in education. I do not mean to imply this is the case in Argentina – I am sure your knowledge is greater than mine – but the results are the results and the measure that have led to them are public and open to refinements based on high-quality constructive feedback. If you can suggest additional effective indicators that we can collect comprehensively for all other countries in the region or the world we will gladly put them forward for consideration.
You’d be doing a great disservice to liberal arts (and sciences) schools as well as to the credibility of your assessment if you don’t include those schools. There might be parameters for factoring them into the assessment. If your target is identifying research and graduate schools, shouldn’t you be qualifying your rankings as “World Research & Graduate University Rankings” or something similar. [In one recent response to a comment, you did say research pubs or citations should not be the only ground for your qualification)
I also suspect many academics (outside North America) might not be aware of liberal arts colleges. If they knew what a great job these institutions do to lay the foundation of a solid lifelong scholarship for young people, I don’t think you’d exclude them in good conscience. Perhaps you are aware their contribution to the body of PhD-seekers and researchers? You ought to have roadshows educating academics to these colleges.
On an unrelated matter, aren’t Nobel prizes so over-rated? Any academic must be able to reel off hundreds of worthy researchers that get overlooked. Did Grigori Perelman get that piece of paper? Did Oliver Sacks? (Not to speak of Gandhi…) I can reel off forever ….Please, please drop it!
Disclosure: I’m (was) neither a student nor staff of any liberal arts colleges. I do not have children or relatives there but I admit I have a high school student who is only interested in pursuing undergrad studies in a liberal arts school and he is confused and embarrassed by the terrific choices.
WE DO NOT USE NOBEL PRIZES.
It seems you are getting our ranking a little confused with the Academic Ranking of World Universities coming out of Shanghai. We agree – only 816 individuals have won a Nobel Prize, including Peace and Literature which are excluded from the Shanghai evaluation anyway. So – for an example – the Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to William Conrad Roentgen in 1901 counts towards the ranking of ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, the last of which he graduated from in 1869. What that says about the quality of those institutions today is far from clear.
Liberal Arts is an interesting challenge – and certainly there is quality and depth there. We have been figuring out how we can make some of our work more applicable in this context, but obviously with few exceptions this is an institution type largely unique to North America so it is difficult to draw meaningful international comparisons.
I am afraid that a ranking based upon on a survey concerning reputation as a variable (40%) really hurts QS’s believability. Some of the English schools and Chinese schools are way, way overrated by QS. I have visited these schools and no way are they even close to the quality and production of many, many American schools (I am not pro-American– it is just an observation). I find the Jiao Tong’s results much more believable and closer to actual experience. I have been to 35 countries and lectured at many schools. I have looked “under the hood” of many schools and reputation of these schools does not match actual current performance. I would urge evaluations that are based upon actual production (grants, publications, number of PhDs., awards), not hearsay and people’s agendas concerning which school they wish to promote and which school they wish to demote. Sorry,but QS is part of the problem and not part of the answer.
The Shanghai ranking does a decent job of identifying the most prolific institutions in the world for research irrespective of size or discipline. This is not the only measure of quality for universities. The survey response levels we receive transcend individual or person all agendas. None of these systems are perfect and the existence of each encourages the right questions to be asked of the next. We would encourage anyone who considers a survey comprising nearly 34,000 responses from academics not to be a worthwhile measure to look at a different ranking… or none at all.
Why MAPUA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT) is not included in 2011 ranking? And do you guys visit the school personally to evaluate it? I mean do you visit all Universities in each country, im just curious because if you just focus in America, Europe or Australia it would be unfair. I hope this QS will visit all the leading university in a certain country and evaluate it fairly, we cannot consider this QS as a very accurate one because some details of university is lacking. We are looking forward for the improvement of QS next year in terms of its accuracy. THANK YOU!
We will look into the Mapua Institute of Technology for the future.
None of the global rankings we are aware of involve a physical visit to each university every year – the scale of such an exercise would be impractical and prohibitively costly. However, we naturally take the opportunity to visit institutions when the opportunity presents itself. We do not overtly focus in any particualr geography and in fact run specific regional exercises in both Asia and Latin America. It can be easier to access a clear picture in countries where data is more readily available centrally.
I think a mechanism can be developed to curtail cost with regard to the idea of involving a physical visit to the universities. Having QS lead that move would definitely be a giant step towards better results and better reliability.
Having such would help universities which are already widely-recognized nationally but still forming base for a solid international reputation, like most universities in the Philippines.
I know how some people feel with regard to the rankings, especially, for example, if you study in the number one institution in your country and suddenly find that your school ranks somewhere at the 300-400 bracket in the world.
Perhaps a careful review of the criteria or a consideration of some amendments would help should visits would turn out to be totally impossible.
Another question worth asking is, assuming we could find a way to involve a physical visit to all 700+ universities, what would we actually learn that could be applied to the ranking? It would be impractical to physically count their students and faculty and inaccurate to classify people as international based on appearance. The rest of our current data are collected through surveys and third parties.
We have now been doing this for 8 years. The results are more stable than ever and compare favourably with many more established domestic rankings. We have an international academic advisory board comprising over twenty institution leaders and academic experts worldwide, and a review of results and methodology is carefully conducted each year.
How do the QS university rankings compare with the Times Higher Education and Shanghai ARWU university rankings? Are the QS rankings the best in the business? Would like to know. Thank you.
This is a million dollar question of ever there was one. Naturally we favour the approach we are taking but collectively these are the three most widely referenced evaluations of their kind indicating that all three are at least interesting. Rankings are fundamentally limited – even in an ideal world where all data sets were complete, ironclad and unambiguous a ranking is a function of its selection of indicators and the weightings applied. These may or may not come close to your own particular interests or requirements. Picture buying a house… that’s a big decision and one that might be assisted by a ranking of say – most desirable neighbourhoods. The first instinct is to look at the overall result and try and find somewhere in the top x, but what of the ranking designers didn’t involve schools or crime rates?
The overall results of a ranking can be seductive, but examining what they are actually focused on and whether they reflect your instincts is what’s important.
So with that in mind my simple critique is this, make of it what you will.
The Academic Ranking of World Universities initiated at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and now operated by Shanghai Ranking Consultancy was the first global ranking with its first results published in 2003. Its results are based on indicators of scientific productivity including Nobel Prizes, publications in Nature and Science and records in publications indices. It does a pretty good job of identifying the most prolific institutions in the world for research. Larger instituions with a strong focus in the sciences are favoured. With only 816 individuals having ever won a Nobel Prize, the biggest question mark may be the validity of their inclusion in two indicators representing a total of 30% of their methodology.
The QS World University Rankings began in 2004 and were published in Times Higher Education until 2009. They are designed with prospective international students in mind and as a result include measures such as faculty student ratio and the proportion of international faculty and students. It is the only global ranking to take on board employability as a critical factor. It does a better job of taking the size of institutions into account and produces a less US-centric set of results. The most frequent aspect called into question is the significant emphasis placed on survey responses. 40% is based on a survey of academics comprosing over 33,000 responses in five broad areas and 10% based on a survey attracting over 16,000 responses from employers.
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings were launched in 2010 and significantly remodelled in 2011 making year on year comparisons difficult and perhaps misleading. Their system involves 13 indicators grouped into five headings – Teaching, Citations, Research, International Outlook and Innovation. The target audience is the academic readership of their weekly magazine. It is the only of these three to draw on financial indicators such as research funding, which QS has avoided due to the complications of adjusting for exchange rate and cost of living changes. The biggest questions revolve around their citations measure where they have attempted to adjust fairly by discipline leading to Alexandria University placing 4th in the world in 2010 and Royal Holloway at 14th (ahead of Oxford, Cambridge and Yale) in 2011. The other aspect that might be worth thinking about is their principal teaching measure – based on a survey of academics evaluating the quality of teaching at institutions they may never have visited.
Effective teaching measures are the “holy grail” for rankings designers but I would argue that the quest goes on.
Ultimately you have to make your own choice or perhaps draw on a blend of measures from each to form your own unique picture of the best universities for you, in whatever context you are asking the question.
Why is the ETH in Zurich only on the 15th rank? What do you criticize at the ETH in Zurich? Why doesn’t the ETH in Zurich ranks better?
Sorry, I mend the 18th rank.
I can honestly say that this is the first time I have heard a top 20 placing interpreted as a criticism. ETH is clearly an outstanding institution amongst the world’s top 0.1%. No criticism implied.
But there must be a cause why 17 universities rank better. I can only see one reason why they rank better: they have more money.
Money is not directly taken into account in any of our indicators but inevitably plays its part and is also part of the reason why ETH outperforms 20,000 or so other institutions. Ultimately and ranking involves a selection of measures, against those we have selected, ETH is outperfromed by only 17 other institutions worldwide.
Sir QS ranking is a very intresting information provider. But if you add all types of Institutions like general education, technical education and etc. other all types of institutions. this will enable us complete range of data about all institutions in the world of education.
We are working on extending our evaluations to other types of institution, but its a massive task. Watch this space.
Why Xavier University-Ateneo de Cagayan, did’nt make it to TOP 700 Universities?
It is in our systems but to put things in perspective it comes 4,301 in Webometrics and 4,223 in 4icu
Hi. How much would you say one should take to heart this ranking system? Taking into account per say as an example that edinburgh is 9 places above manchester, would a graduate from edinburgh really be more favored. Taking into account that 60% of an employer’s decision to recruit a graduate is based on acquired skills rather than their degree, wouldn’t it be reasonable to take into account how targeted the university is by top employers along with average starting salary and quality of graduates according to employer surveys? For this reason i think employer reputation should be given more weight. To many, the whole point of a better university is better graduate prospects and salary, henceforth i would like to ask how does QS reflect on this?
Truthfully, we would advise not taking ANY ranking system to heart, including our own. They are useful as one input to a very difficult, many faceted decision. If employability is your focus then you can look at those results in isolation. We are working on updating our interactive systems too so individual users will be able to manipulate our data and apply different weightings.
How come the University of Nottingham has such an abysmal academic reputation for chemical engineering with a score less than ten?! Nottingham being the 7th strongest research intensive university in the UK and being in the top 5 most research intensive institute for chemical engineering getting a Research Assessment Exercise average score of 3.00 on average for chemical engineering, placing it at joint third. I’d just like to ask you how come some of the big institutes with such good research get given such incredibly bad academic reputations for specific faculties that they supposedly do well in?!
The University of Nottingham is my alma mater as it happens, so I have a particular interest in their performance in our work and always breathe a sigh of relief when its overall ranking outperforms that of the university attended by my wife.
This year was the first year we have attempted to drill down by discipline. As you might imagine, the data in some disciplines is stronger than others but we can only report the results we get. Academic Reputation is based on a global survey for which in this year’s subject rankings we had 15,050 responses – when we cut that down by discipline it may be the case that fewer Chemical Engineering academics from the UK responded than we might have hoped for. In 2012, we already have some refinements in mind which should help improve this work, but more importantly we now have over 33,000 responses to draw upon which should make for fewer surprises.
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY WARANGAL, INDIA (NITW) ??!! You told that poster that you will look into it… Seriously?! I suggest you not waste your time. This fellow is probably an an alum who seeks to up his marketability a bit but that’s another subject altogether. The fact is, most Indian schools are just papermills or degree/diploma mills. There is no education that goes on. The quality of pedagogy is horrible. There are 250 engineering schools in Hyderabad, not too far from Warangal and all they do it produce under-educated, barely literate job chasers some of who may be good enough to train in English accent (or American, if you will) and provide first line of support to weary western consumers. The stress in Indian schools is pure academia and rote learning. There is no allround development, no research, no immersion is real world developments in their respective fields…. Because technology staff command high salaries, universities are populated by under-skilled, uninspired teachers who would not find a place in community colleges in the USA or Europe or SE Asia. The IITs are good not because of the quality of education but because they admit the cream of a billion people. The kids at IIT are what makes those institutions so good – they are indeed quite brilliant and they would do well anywhere in the world. I wish they are provided more rounded, worldly skills. Now, even this segment is being diluted as the Indian state’s social engineering policies apportion admissions to all sorts of demographic segments to rectify centuries-old social repression (no, no gays yet though…). [Curiously, western companies apply the IIT "yardstick" even to those institutions' master's students and hire them blindly. These grad students are drawn from around the country based purely on exam results and, once in, do no original research nor pursue any thoughtful scholarship].
Strategically speaking, Indians have a difficult time looking far ahead and learning from the extraordinary strides made by countries such as Singapore, S. Korea, Israel, Turkey, etc., forget the west. Indians really love the word “strategy” but have no weltenschaung.
Before you think of flaming me, please know that I’m an Indian and a product of the Indian university system. Yes, I agree, I could have written a more studied, nuanced (not to speak of proofed) copy if I studied elsewhere.
All that said, the Warangal Institute of Whatever – forget it. I don’t know where that man gets his ranking from but it’s NOT “ranked with the IITs”, whatever that means….
Regretfully Yours
Ram
Top quality rant. It is clear that HE in India faces some unique challenges. 5 million additional undergrad places are needed by 2015. Reform is desperately needed and the political environment for such is challenging. We will always try and investigate any institution that we are made aware of. Some of these investigations are blissfully short.
I’m not even from India but why would Kenichi Yoshida say “Indian engineers are the backbone of japans IT industry”…it feels like you just generalized millions of individuals based on the country they are from that’s a bit discriminatory wouldn’t you say?
you should separated between the quality of education process and the quality of output. Some output are good because the input are good enough but you can’t say the process are good too, because the process is good JUST IF it makes bad input become good output. Let say the quality of Indian enginner graduate from Indian university are good, you must know that it is because they are brilliant by genetics or the education made it. Ram clearly say that the Indian university didn’t do anything at all.
I can see this point of view, although it is exceptionally difficult to measure. The OECD are working on their Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) which is an ambitious initiative designed to evaluate this and we are watching with interest. I would argue that if anything, it is a function of probablility and demand that drives the success of Indian institutions rather than genetics per se.
Univ. California Berkeley gets hammered for Int’l students? 5% of the weighted score and to drops down that far? That is a joke. 100% on the most weighted. Ridiculous.
The area in which Berkeley performs least well is Faculty Student ratio, worth 20% of the overall methodology and in which it places outside the world’s top 300. That said our data shows improvement here in comparison with 2010 and as a result Berkeley has gained ground for 2011. By contrast Berkeley is withing the world’s top 200 for International Students and compares favourably with the likes of Duke and Michigan which place above it overall.
Whatever your overall perspective on our methodology and/or selection of indicators it is worth forming an accurate interpretation of the facts before forming and voicing an opinion.
So in your rankings University of Michigan is the 14th best in the world…but 28th in the U.S….hmmmm?!
The two sets of rankings are compiled by different organisations using very different methodologies. Inevitably international rankings place a strong emphasis on research outputs and quality which may have led to much of the difference between the two tables.
Ben — Given the weighting & methodology described, the ratings appear to make sense (this is always an ‘art’ as you acknowledge — thus, subject to shifts based on subtleties in factor weighting).
I’m also an ‘old’ UC Berkeley grad and have to say that UCB’s ranking (as you said of ETH’s) is hard to grouse about; I’ll take the company of the top 1% +/- globally without losing too much sleep. My hunch, also, is that its international name recognition is higher than at least a few above it (though perhaps less deserved now than it may one time have been when there was a far less competitive global higher education environment).
Another factor — perhaps the flip-side to Berkeley’s sub-par student/teacher ratio — is the cost per credit/degree relative to the other 20 top universities above it in your rating. I’m not sure as to the relative tax-base support of the two other state universities above it — U Penn or U Michigan — vs UCB, but I’d guess UCB’s comparative cost to the student is lower — certainly when compared to the private U’s listed above it. I know that when assessing the desirability of universities, cost is clearly a heavy weighting factor for most students. I also suspect that the fact of state support (especially given California’s financial woes) also contributes to the class size overloading.
Thus, perhaps a future refinement might incorporate such a factor at least as an alternative weighting (one with only the academic credential factors and one including cost to student).
Overall though — a yeoman’s effort and very enlightening. You/your team are to be commended.
Many thanks for your comments. We have done a great deal of work on collecting data on tuition fees over the last 12 months but we have opted to publish these data alongside the results rather than involve them in the ranking itself. To otherwise would intorduce factors such as exchange rates in to the rankings as is the case with the FT business school ranking for example as previously posted here
Sorry – missed a decimal… I meant “.1%” +/- globally
Can I ask what the official ranking for the National University of Ireland Maynooth as they have just published an article in the college newspaper stating they are in the top 400 of these rankings yet they seem to be in the 501-550 category. Here is a link to the article, http://communications.nuim.ie/press/06102011.shtml
Thanks
Sam
The reference in the article is not to our ranking but to that published by Times Higher Education.
It’s great reading all of the angry rants by people who want their alma mater ranked higher. I’m a University of Michigan grad, so naturally I just want to say thank you and you guys did a great job.
my university”Toronto” was ranked in the top 100 as well, but I was just curious as to why some universities ranked in the 200′s from arwu and times were ranked in the 400+ on qs:s
Different methodologies produce different results. LSE, for example, features in the top 100 in THE but well outside 200 in ARWU. Without specific examples it is difficult to provide more insight as the reasons for varations in performance may be individual to the institutions in question.
Dear Ben, So University of Wits, SA is the African University that makes the first 400? How many Universities were considered in Africa?
Thank you
In 2011, QS considered in the region of 2,700 institutions, 712 of which made it onto our final list. 10 of those 712 were from Africa. Whilst other countries were considered earlier in the process, the final 10 are split evenly (in number) between Egypt and South Africa with top performer being the University of Cape Town at 156 and Witwatersrand the only other African institution to make the top 400.
Interesting The University of Manitoba and The University of Guelph were ranked in the 200′s by arwu, and Guelph was ranked as the top 1-4 comprehensive university in Canada by Macleans, they are both also in the top 14 research Universities of Canada “http://www.researchinfosource.com/media/2010Top50List.pdf”
yet Manitoba was ranked in the 390′s and Guelph was ranked in the 400′s?
This is a bit odd.
does qs lack rankings in plant/veterinary science, microbiology, evolution, genomic’s, environmental science,agricultural science etc ? resulting in these low ranks.
Our bibliometric data covers the complete content of Scopus, our academic respondent data features responses from over 33,000 academics worldwide, in broadly predictable proportions by discipline.
Yet your observations are interesting – naturally different ranking methodologies will deliver different results but in the main there are some very strong consistencies between the Maclean’s work and our own – the same top 4 in the same order for example. Whilst it is not clear how the Medical Doctoral universities and the Comprehensive universities would sit if all put in the same pot in the Maclean’s approach (i.e. is one group naturally superior to the other, making Simon Fraser 16th [Scenario 1], or would there be an overlap which might see Simon Fraser as high as 10th [Scenario 2]) the correlations seem strong.
Looking at your two examples, Manitoba places 15th in its group in Maclean’s and 17th in Canada in our approach – making the carrleations pretty close in Scenario 1 and perhaps even closer in Scenario 2. Guelph, on the other hand, places 4th in the comprehensive universities group making them arguably between 15th and 19th overall – and in our approach they come in 18th place in Canada.
In the other source you have cited Manitoba and Guelph seem to come 12th and 15th but the rankings seems to be based entirely on total research funding, taking no account of size or discipline focus. So whilst Manitoba for example place 12th, there are 6 institutions ranked lower that have a higher yield per faculty – different methodologies produce different results but even given that there is a lot of consistency between these different approaches.
Good observation Jake.
This still not explain why the University of Guelph and Manitoba are ranked so low ~400 in Qs whereas they rank in the 200′s in other rankings. This discrepancy is huge.
Why is Università Bocconi not ranked?
They are ranked within our Social Sciences vertical, but to be in the overall rankings a university has to operate programs in more than one of our five dicipline areas.
why there is no any african universities among the best 100 university in the world
There is a lot of development work going on in some parts of Africa and, in particular, Egypt and South Africa have begun to feature in our studies, but the truth is that, at least for research – upon what much of this study is based, African universities are not sufficiently competitive across the academic spectrum.
What exactly is Academic Reputation and Employer Reputation? and how do they affect a graduate? One point to make also is that the number of citations a university makes doesn’t reflect the quality of the material. One university may make less citations, but it may be overall more scientifically more useful than a university that produces a cornucopia of useless citations
*more scientifically useful
A university doesn’t “produce citations”. Their publications attract citations – in general terms a publication that attracts more citations can be considered more influential than one that does not receive any. The employer and academic reputation of an institution may well have a profound effect on a graduate in terms of employability around the world or access to further education opportunities. In many cases employers will have a list of target universities that they choose to recruit from and for highly coveted jobs may use this as a filter to get down to a manageable number of applicants to invite for interview. These lists are often built on reputation and tradition.
How does a university gain the attention of this list? is it strictly data based or can say a student get the university to be acknowledged?
Dear Ms Weyer,
Any university has to fulfil a set of criteria in order to be considered for inclusion in our QS World University Rankings exercise.
How can a university get onto our initial list of universities to be evaluated?
Level:
The university must run undergraduate AND graduate/postgraduate programs.
Faculty:
The university must run programs that objectively qualify under more than one of our 5 subject areas (Arts & Humanities, Engineering & IT, Life Sciences, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences)
Please note: Running a joint diploma with another school DOES NOT qualify the school as being active in the subject area offered by the other school.
Cooperation to provide accurate data:
Universities are expected to provide us with accurate data. Please note that the figures should be based on the last annual reporting period (the last complete academic, financial or calendar year, whichever is easier to provide). For example, the university will need to be able to answer questions regarding faculty, undergraduate and graduate/postgraduate statistics.
Justification to participate in our ranking:
The university should provide us with an argument/statement of why the institution should be included based on objective comparison between their university and other institutions (in their country/region) that are already included in the top 500.
The university should also refer to inclusion in any domestic ranking if available and appropriate.
Additional Stimuli we take into consideration:
Academic and Employer Reputation surveys performance
I hope the above answers your question.
Baerbel Eckelmann
Research Manager
Hi , I just cant digest that university of karachi is ranked 601plus in the world. With no such research, proper faculty and phd, mPhil producing capabilities how can one rate it such high. I have been teaching and was an student their (along with few foreign universities) and I can tell you the difference is massive, massive. Even in Pakistan a logical, technical survey can identify it as not being fit for top 10, so putting it that high globally i like a joke to me. I am not blaming anybody or your methodology, but without research and without checking the quality of the qualified students its really unfair to nominate any institue.
Our rankings in 2011 featured 712 universities. 601+ was the lowest band we published. If your observations are accurate poor performing universities will continue to be displaced by other, more worthy institutions as our lists increase in size over time.
Firstly, thanks for a reasonably straightforward formula for the rankings. Is there anyway to sort the lists by criteria? For instance, sort in order of reputation, citations, or any single criteria for that matter.
Secondly, I noticed some criteria are blank. For example, UC Berkeley has a blank space for faculty/student ratio. Does that mean the school did not report for that variable? I assumed that’s what it meant but when looking at UC Berkeley (my alma mater) it was far below other universities despite the fact that it had higher scores in every single category presented. I assume the faculty/ratio must be abysmal as that’s the only way it would come out lower then schools with lower scores in all other areas. Is there a reason the faculty/student ratio isn’t displayed at all? It makes it difficult to draw some comparisons when data not presented or visible drastically affects a school’s general standing.
Hello Mr. Sowter, You’re doing a great job with your team. All I wanna say is that You try to take an even deeper evaluation of those Universities before coming up with your final rankings. Schools like University of East London, University of Northingham with astounding Satelite campuses in different countries, across several continents can really hope to get a better rankings if well evaluated. Once again thanks to you and your team for the great works done so far.
When the data were collected from the current ranking? Thank you.
The data collection period was December 2010-May 2011.
Regarding the Academic Peer Review: Where can I find the full breakdown of respondents by country and level? Can you give me a link? Thanks and regards, Horst Albert Glaser
Here it is: http://www.iu.qs.com/projects-and-services/world-university-rankings/2011-academic-survey-responses/
Could you please provide the weightings of the academic, employer and citations per faculty that is used to calculate the overall score for the various subject fields such as chemical engineering. Thanks.
http://www.iu.qs.com/projects-and-services/subject-tables/
Good day,
i have been looking for the rankings, and they look good but i just have doubts about one university ranking: Universidad de Buenos Aires only ranks 270 in the 2011/2012 university rankings and the faculty rankings rank her 48 in Social Sciences, 51 in Arts & Humanities, 59 in Life Sciences, 89 in Natural Sciences, 115 in Engineering & IT. Shouldn’t be better rank in the global 2011/2012 university rankings? Because we also can observe that some universities such as University of York ranks 96 in the 2011/2012 university rankings and the faculty rankings only rank her 123 in Social Sciences, 66 in Arts & Humanities, 150 in Life Sciences, 210 in Natural Sciences, 244 in Engineering & IT. So, i can suppose the Universidad de Buenos Aires should be better rank. Perhaps i ignore something and the ranks are made in a way i don’t know but it sounds logical Universidad de Buenos Aires should be better rank and other one should rank 200+ instead of 80-100.
Please, i really hope you to reply me to explain me to know how are made these rankings, and if there’s a university rank to change.
Thank you very much!
“Universidad de Buenos Aires” rankings: http://www.topuniversities.com/institution/universidad-de-buenos-aires/wur
“University of York” raankings: http://www.topuniversities.com/institution/university-york/wur
http://www.iu.qs.com/2011/12/12/number-crunching/
Thank you very much!!
Dear Mr Sowter,
re the Academic Peer Review again: I see that the number of people responding for different countries does vary. Have these numbers been normalized for further calculations?
Thanks, HAG
Of course. First we separate the domestic from the international context. The domestic context takes into account the level of response from the country and the number of institutions in that country from which each respondent gets to choose. The international context is then geographically normalized.
respected delicates, I wish to pursue pg in desing mechanical engineering I need your help in choosing the university as I’m from India please kindly tell the necessary scores for it.
I would be thankful to you
At home or abroad? What is your academic profile? Engineering programs at top schools in India can be didproportionately competitive and invite consideration of international alternatives especially if you are academically strong but not quite genius level. These links may help:
A closer look at the Mechanical Engineering ranking results
Mechanical Engineering results
Around 35-40 yrs ago there was never any ranking of world universities. In the US for example, people grouped universities into Ivy League, major public universities, private liberal colleges …. in France, people grouped universities into Grandes Ecoles, public universities, etc … the “rankings” were in groups, not in “ranks” 1, 2, 3, 4, … 50, 51, 52, … 98, 99 …
Why does everybody now rank world universities? Who is this for? Your ranking, and other’s rankings, no doubt require long and tedious work with lots of labor, effort, and resources, involved. Who are the beneficiaries of all this? What forces motivate this world ranking? Is it driven by the students/alumni, or the faculty/administration, or the global conglomerates, or the governments/political leaders of the world, or …. ?
If professional characteristics (abbreviated P) is considered to be one important criterion of a good University, then a high score using the current indicators above that you utilize to gauge ranking (abbreviated H) is such that loosely speaking, we can say that P implies H but it is certainly not true to say that H implies P, since it is possible by mere administrative arrangements and finance through various well known means to achieve H without having any P qualities. For instance, all serious Chemistry departments in the USA strive to achieve – a service provided free of charge- some form of ACS (American Chemical Society, a professional body) approval or accreditation for their teaching and research programs. The criteria are stringent and produces as an end result capable and functional graduates – which is, and should be – the primary purpose of any Institution of Higher Learning. On the other hand, if H is achieved through financial and administrative arrangements, such as the hiring of academics of repute and opening doors to foreigners based on cultural bias that is detrimental to the cultural ecology of a society then P – the primary hallmark of a University – is not achieved even if H is achieved and a high rank is indicated and displayed before the world. I therefore encourage you to provide a metric that would focus primarily on P which is an objective standard because there are some very excellent professional and international bodies, such as the ACS, that can be referred to with regard to compliance to professional standards. I think that industry, researchers and especially students would prefer this metric P to H, which can be achieved without academic capability but through various arrangements. I think you would, as a consequence, also be doing the world a great favour in providing a transparent and more useful and objective profile of the state of international academia. I can say that the Universities that I am aware of here where I work hardly bother to have their courses and programs accredited by a professional body, although they are dead serious about H and spend all their resources on improving H without bothering about P.
Your use of proportion of international students is places an artificial bias in favor of those located in small countries, especially in Europe where travel between countries is easier and there are fewer visa issues. Notice who scores well in this category among the top tier schools: Imperial College, UCL, ETH, HKU, NUS, EPFL, HKUST. All but the UK schools located very near much larger countries with a large prospective student body. Compare that to who scores poorly in this category: Berkeley, Michigan, Penn, Yale, Duke, Toronto, Brown. What your ranking is essentially saying is that going to school in the US is bad, because…it’s a large country located far from most other large countries?
Any ranking system selects indicators of strength based on the key interests of the audience for whom it is designed. For a prospective international student, the number of international students already making the same decision is a meaningful piece of information regardless of the factors that may contribute to it.
Most indicators introduce bias of some kind. It could be said that the use of citations disadvantages European institutions due to their not having existed in as intense “publish or perish” environment as those in the US.
This is where the weightings come in to play, we believe the current level of international students is a relevant indicator for our audience but it only has so much to say about the quality of the institution in conventional terms and as such carries a low weighting.
Hi there, in order for my sponsor to agree on sponsoring my scholarship to a certain country, they require the university to be listed on the QS ranking, so if the university i want to study at does not appear when i write its name in the search box what does it mean ? And how can i find out its ranking ?
What university is it?
Ive noticed, you really give too much weight to academic reputation, but too little to the ultimate consumers of the university products, that is the employers of the graduated students. Here in Mexico its well know the employeers opinion on the UNAM its less than poor, never the less you give that university a high ranking.
Ours is the only international ranking placing any weight at all on employability or the reputation amongst employers. UNAM is a nation-building institution with vast numbers of students. It seems unlikely that all employers consider the institution “less than poor” but also likely that some employers may have a disappointing experience when interacting with the institution or some of its graduates. As it happens, in last year’s QS University Rankings: Latin America we placed a higher weighting on Employer Reputation, exactly because of feedback like your own indicating that employability and the responsibility of universities to prepare students for the workplace is a particularly critical priority in the region and, as it happens, UNAM, which places joint first from the region in the world rankings, drops to 5th in the rebalanced regional context.
I have the same question I posted on another site of yours. I looked at the ranking and still cannot fathom how your methodology placed Stanford so low and I looked it up and in previous rankings posted by QS had Stanford placed even lower. So you guys seriously think Stanford has much fewer international faculty and international students than for example Harvard that it is not even placed in the top 10. This is very misleading and I’m not sure how you come up with your ranking, but being involved with some of the top US universities for the last 20 years or so, I still think your ranking is the poorest among the peers, such as Times Higher Education (Stanford #2), ARWU(Stanford #2), and US&NWR graduate and undergrad ranking, where Stanford is in the first 5 of pretty much all departments, a feat even Harvard finds difficult to match. Please explain this anomaly in your ranking. Thanks.
Thank you for your comments.
All rankings have their critics and all too often that criticism is grounded in a paradigm based on the performance of a single institution. However, good Stanford may be, I don’t accept that the performance of Stanford alone is directly correlated with the quality and validity of a ranking overall. In our ranking, Stanford scores 93.4 out of a possible 100 points, where it loses is out in our analysis is in international faculty and probably more importantly faculty student ratio. Our ranking is designed to provide discernment down through hundreds of universities and whilst these two indicators are an important part of doing that, they may not be the most indicative in terms of sorting through institutions in the top 20.
None of the rankings you list are flawless. Naturally in a more constrained domestic environment the US News approach has the luxury of access to more data and is in a league of its own when discerning between leading US institutions. The ARWU ranking, by contrast, uses Nobel Prizes and Fields medals as an indicator, which is great at discerning between the likes of Harvard and Stanford but non existent when moving beyond the top 100. The Times Higher Education ranking in its first year placed Alexandria University in Egypt ahead of Harvard and Stanford for citations and Royal Holloway ahead of Oxford and Cambridge in the same measure in its second.
All these rankings have their flaws and they present themselves in different ways depending on your perspective. We actively encourage all our stakeholders to figure our what is being measured and realize that these are all different interpretations, none of them personalized to the individual. It is inevitable that institutions themselves, and their alumni, will naturally favour the ranking that places their own institution in the best possible light.
What is very clear, is that even by our measurement, Stanford is 11th in the world, placing it in the world’s top 0.2% of the world’s universities and making it a simply staggering centre of excellence for research and scholarship.
What is the reason why Washington State University do not move its rank. It is still in the range of 350-400. Do you think they can move into 200 range?
Some detailed and trend analysis may be required to answer your question in more detail. In general terms, our rankings have become relatively stable as institutions have learned to better understand our submission requirements and survey numbers and other analysis have become increasingly robust. In this context a rapid elevation of over 150 places is extremely unlikely.
I will reckon your methodology as the best I’ve ever seen. Pls, which Nigerian Uniersity ranks highest in the world, and what number is it?
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?typeCode=175
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2007
There clearly must be something wrong with your ranking. You guys used the same methodology in 2004 and 2005 as well as 2007. Are you sure you did the math correctly(I am serious…)? Stanford was number 5 in 2005 and number 7 in 2004. Berkeley was number 2 in 2004 and 6 in 2005. Why did their numbers fall all the sudden? Or are you favoring British Universities?
It seems starting from 2007, you guys put 90+ rating on all universities suddenly. Why are you playing favorites?
Now, you don’t even display the numbers on your website anymore.
We made some well documented changes to our methodology in 2007 and even had them published in the journal “Higher Education in Europe”. A chronology of refinements is available on this site here: http://www.iu.qs.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/refinement-chronology/. Obviously we didn’t “start putting 90+ rating” on all universities suddenly but introduced what we felt and still feel are more appropriate normalization and scaling techniques to draw an overall picture of university quality globally. We acknowledge that British universities generally perform well in our ranking in comparison to others, but since we are an international company head-quartered in London we would probably prefer the opposite to be true and our system was never designed with that intention. If it helps in any way, only one member of our research staff is British, we are not affiliated to the British government, establishment or any British institution in any way. If anything British participation in our events and publications is probably lower than you might expect for a company based in London. All rankings have their limitations – depending on where you stand, hiring a Nobel Prize winner who never even visits your campus can gain you 50-100 places in the Shanghai ranking but it doesn’t genuinely mean you’ve improved by that much, just that you have a person on your staff who did something very clever and important somewhere else a few years ago.
I’m a prospective student aiming to pursue post graduation in Computer Science/Information Systems. Therefore, I was going through the list of QS World Rankings 2011/12 in the field of Computer Science and Information Systems. I found that after rank 50, the ranks of universities is displayed as 51-100, 101-150 and so on. So, how should I rank the universities that come under these brackets?
Well… you should stop and think about what is important to you first. Does it matter if the institution is 15th or 18th in this year’s ranking or just that you went to a Top 20 school… next year the positions may be reversed. Really, as a prospective student the best way to look at rankings is in ranges, once you have decided that your target is to get into a “top 100 school” you can start looking at other things that matter to you to make up the rest of the decision – facilities, the location, specific specializations within the course etc… rather than fixating on whether or not the institution in 56th or 65th. Use the ranking as a guide for narrowing down this complex decision rather than an excuse for not making it yourself and later swearing at us for encouraging you to study in a city you don’t like, or a climate you can’t stand.