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How to use university rankings to find a top university
This article helps you understand the best way to use university rankings so that you get the best possible result for your university search.
You have decided that you would like to study at a top university: whether it be an undergraduate degree or graduate program, in your home country or to study abroad. Wherever you are in the world, as soon as you begin to consider the quality of universities, you are likely to encounter one of the numerous university rankings. Rankings can assist your decision-making process if used properly, but they must be fully understood, or they could lead you to miss the very institution that is right for you.
Why use rankings?
It would be impossible to have a complete overview of all the institutions worldwide that might possibly be right for your chosen study. There are thousands of universities offering many more thousands of courses. There may be hundreds of universities in your own country and thousands in your continent. University rankings provide you with an overview starting with the “best”. In theory, this allows you to start a search and selection aiming for the top university you have a chance of getting into, and will introduce you to many institutions you might never have considered or even heard of. Contemporary rankings are usually available online. The top 500, available on this site, is based on the THES-QS World University Rankings and serves a valuable practical purpose by offering you a direct electronic link to profiles of each institution.
Your priorities
It is natural to approach any university ranking on the basis that it genuinely reflects the relative strengths of the institutions covered. But, it is vital to remember that all rankings select their own methodology and individual evaluation criteria on which to base the ranking. It is recommended that you are clear about what is important to you at your prospective university. If one of your priorities is extracurricular opportunities, for example, a standard ranking is unlikely to include this as one of the chosen criteria. You would be best advised to make a pre-selection from a reputable ranking and then shortlist on the basis of what you can find out elsewhere about the location and opportunities available to students outside their studies. Some rankings focus heavily on academic criteria and achievement, citing numbers of Nobel Prize winners, for example. It is for you to decide what is most important for you.
THES – QS World University Rankings
The THES-QS World University Rankings is based on five criteria that aim to balance an overview of academic excellence (peer review, citations/faculty), teaching (faculty/student ratio), internationality (how international the faculty is, how international the student body is) and profile of the institution with employers. You also need to consider how each ranking weights its criteria. Press coverage and interest in a ranking is always based on the overall score, which is the synthesis of all the measured criteria. You may well find it useful to analyze the ranking when the different criteria are broken down. For example, Harvard University holds the top spot in the overall ranking. If the criteria relating to internationality are important to you, then a look down the top twenty will reveal not Harvard in the top spot but London School of Economics in terms of both international faculty and student numbers, with Harvard ranking in twelfth and equal fifteenth place respectively. This presents quite a different picture. If you register on topuniversities.com you will have access to the full breakdown of the rankings and how they were reached. You can also read about the selection and methodology behind the rankings here.
Top university in your subject
The same principle applies to subject excellence. Just because a university comes out very well in a ranking, doesn’t mean that it is equally good in all subject areas. Any overall ranking score inevitably involves an averaging snapshot across an institution. It will certainly be relevant to you to find out which institutions are strongest in your chosen discipline. This comparative data is not always easy to measure or access. The invaluable book to any worldwide university search, Guide to the World’s Top Universities, available to buy directly from the publisher, QS, through this website, includes a chapter which ranks the world’s Top 100 Universities in five areas: Arts & Humanities, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and Engineering & IT. In 2006, the University of Cambridge held three of these top spots. The University of Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology each held one. Again, a different picture from the overall ranking appears upon which to evaluate universities for your search.
Limitations
All the aspects of university rankings mentioned above can be very useful to your university search, but it is important to be aware of their potential limitations, particularly when you are looking to study abroad. There has been much research carried out as to how accurate any ranking can ever be (see also the article on this site University Rankings and their Impact on Students) and university rankings will always be vulnerable to criticism. One often-highlighted aspect is the difficulty of comparing research output worldwide. The majority of internationally evaluated academic journals are published in English and, it is often argued that this leads to the potential for such countries as France, Germany and Italy that have a long and rigorous academic tradition in their own languages, to be underrepresented. In addition, a country like Germany has much of its most famous scientific output taking place under the auspices of the independent Max Planck Institut, with its scientists feeding into German universities. This excellence will not necessarily appear in university rankings. To remedy this, it is always advisable to research indigenous rankings in the countries you are interested in, in addition to global rankings. In Germany, for example, DAAD, The German Academic Exchange Service, featured in this Newsletter under Institution Watch, highlights the ranking of German Universities developed by Die Zeit and CHE: http://www.das-ranking.de.
University Rankings
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