How to Get the Most Out of University Rankings

Choosing a university and degree program is a major life decision, and can often seem like a daunting prospect. The range of factors to take into consideration is vast: from identifying a program or research area that best serves your intellectual interests and career goals, to finding the programs and institutions with the best reputation in your field, selecting a country or city to study in, and working out how you are going to pay for it.

University rankings alone won’t solve the complex problem of where and what you should study – and nor should you expect them to. But the evidence suggests they are playing a role in the decision-making process of a growing number of prospective students. Over 15 million visitors consulted the QS World University Rankings at TopUniversities.com in 2012, a number that has grown each year since the rankings were first produced in 2004.

So how can you get the most out of university rankings and apply them intelligently to your own circumstances and priorities?

Know what university rankings measure

The first thing to note is that there are numerous university rankings out there, and the things they measure vary widely – from academic reputation to research citations to student satisfaction to web presence to the number of CEOs who have graduated from a given institution.

Many of the things that make a university the best choice for a given person aren’t easily reduced to data, and rankings can only ever hope to capture a snapshot of university performance in certain broad areas. Yet most sensible methodologies will produce useful information for the right audience if applied intelligently.

Ascertaining what a given ranking does and doesn’t measure – and what its intended audience is – will help you find the information that is most relevant to your decision-making process.

Compare universities internationally

The QS World University Rankings are designed to take into account a range of considerations that are of direct relevance for prospective students – in particular those who need a way to compare universities internationally. They are based partly on reputation and partly on data on research, staffing levels and international diversity. They remain the only university rankings to take into account the views of graduate employers.

The QS World University Rankings set out to answer five main questions about the world’s best universities:

• How strong is the university’s reputation among academics?
• How strong is the reputation of the university’s graduates among employers?
• How many academics are employed for every student admitted?
• How much influential research is produces?
• How international is the university?

In order to answer these questions, the ranking draws on the views of more than 70,000 academics and employers worldwide on two key issues. Academics are asked to name the universities that are currently producing the best research within their field and region. Employers are asked to name the universities that they think produce the best graduates. The rankings also measure research citations, student/faculty ratio, and the proportion of international students and staff.

In order to get the most out of the QS World University Rankings, it is important to view them not just as an overall league table, but as a source of comparative data on university performance in a range of areas. Looking at the results of different indicators individually will give you a much richer source of information and help you identify institutions that stand out in the areas that matter most to you. 

Find the top universities in your subject

For many prospective students, perhaps the most useful university rankings are those that focus on the strengths of specific departments. For this reason, since 2010 QS has produced the QS World University Rankings by Subject, which now rank the world’s top universities in 30 individual subjects.

The 30 individual tables are not intended to combine to form an overall ranking, and indeed there is more than one way to interpret which university comes out on top if we attempt to do so. While Harvard currently claims more number one spots than any other institution, the university that appears in the top ten in most subjects is the University of Cambridge, with 27, ahead of Oxford and Berkeley on 23, Stanford (22) and Harvard (21).

The QS World University Rankings by Subject show that internationally respected departments exist all over the world in a wide variety of disciplines. A total of 678 universities make the top 200 in at least one of the 30 subjects, meaning time spent looking through the ranking for your chosen field could identify dozens of institutions offering high-quality programs.

What are the limits of university rankings?

Bottom line: university rankings are just one of a number of resources that will help you get a better sense of your options. They won’t answer all your questions for you, and you should always consult as many different sources of information as you can to ensure that you are making the right decision for you. That means visiting university fairs and speaking to recruitment officers, visiting university websites and faculty pages, contacting alumni and faculty, and asking the advice of your current professors. 

But university rankings can also play a useful role, offering comparative data that would otherwise not be available. If you isolate the areas of information that are most relevant to you and apply them intelligently to your own situation, they can help identify universities that are strong in your field, and perhaps lead you to find out about departments and programs you wouldn’t otherwise have considered.

This article is adapted from the QS Top Grad School Guide 2013/14.