QS World University Rankings

QS World University Rankings

Editor	Danny Byrne
Categories	Higher education
Frequency	Annual
Publisher	QS Quacquarelli Symonds Limited
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Website	QS World University Rankings

The QS World University Rankings are annual university rankings published by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) which provides overall rankings as well as rankings for individual subjects. QS also publishes additional regional rankings, the QS Asian University Rankings, the QS Latin American University Rankings, and the QS BRICS University Rankings, all of which are independent of and different to the major world rankings due to differences in the criteria and weightings used to generate them.^[1]

The publisher originally released its rankings in publication with Times Higher Education from 2004 to 2009 as the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings, but the two ended their collaboration in 2010. QS assumed sole publication of the pre-existing methodology, while Times Higher Education created a new one with Thomson Reuters, published as Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

The QS World University Rankings is regarded as one of the three most influential and widely observed international university rankings, along with the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities.^[2][3][4]

History

The need for an international ranking of universities was highlighted in December 2003 in Richard Lambert’s review of university-industry collaboration in Britain^[5] for HM Treasury, the finance ministry of the United Kingdom. Amongst its recommendations were world university rankings, which Lambert said would help the UK to gauge the global standing of its universities.

The idea for the rankings was credited in Ben Wildavsky's book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World,^[6] to then-editor of Times Higher Education (THE), John O'Leary. THE chose to partner with educational and careers advice company Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) to supply the data, appointing Martin Ince,^[7] formerly deputy editor and later a contractor to THE, to manage the project.

Between 2004 and 2009, QS produced the rankings in partnership with THE. In 2009, THE announced they would produce their own rankings, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, in partnership with Thomson Reuters. THE cited a weakness in the methodology of the original rankings,^[8] as well as a perceived favoritism in the existing methodology for science over the humanities,^[9] as one of the key reasons for the decision to split with QS.

QS retained the intellectual property in the Rankings and the methodology used to compile them ^{[citation needed]} and continues to produce the rankings, now called the QS World University Rankings.^[10] THE created a new methodology with Thomson Reuters, published as the Times Higher Education World University Rankings in September 2010.

Methodology of the major rankings

QS publishes the rankings results in key media around the world, including US News & World Report in the United States and Chosun Ilbo in Korea. The first rankings produced by QS independently of THE, and using QS's consistent and original methodology, were released on September 8, 2010, with the second appearing on September 6, 2011.

QS tried to design its rankings to look at a broad range of university activity.

Academic peer review (40%)

The most controversial part of the QS World University Rankings is their use of an opinion survey referred to as the Academic Peer Review. Using a combination of purchased mailing lists and applications and suggestions, this survey asks active academicians across the world about the top universities in fields they know about. QS has published the job titles and geographical distribution of the participants.

The 2011 rankings made use of responses from 33,744 people from over 140 nations in its Academic Peer Review, including votes from the previous two years rolled forward provided there was no more recent information available from the same individual. Participants can nominate up to 30 universities but are not able to vote for their own. They tend to nominate a median of about 20, which means that this survey includes over 500,000 data points.^[11]

In 2004, when the rankings first appeared, academic peer review accounted for half of a university's possible score. In 2005, its share was cut to 40 per cent because of the introduction of the Recruiter Review.

Faculty student ratio (20%)

This indicator accounts for 20 per cent of a university’s possible score in the rankings. It is a classic measure used in various ranking systems as a surrogate for teaching commitment, but QS has admitted that it is less than satisfactory.^[12]

Citations per faculty (20%)

Citations of published research are among the most widely used inputs to national and global university rankings. The QS World University Rankings used citations data from Thomson (now Thomson Reuters) from 2004 to 2007, and since then uses data from Scopus, part of Elsevier. The total number of citations for a five-year period is divided by the number of academicians in a university to yield the score for this measure, which accounts for 20 per cent of a university’s possible score in the Rankings.

QS has explained that it uses this approach, rather than the citations per paper preferred for other systems, because it reduces the effect of biomedical science on the overall picture – bio-medicine has a ferocious “publish or perish” culture. Instead QS attempts to measure the density of research-active staff at each institution. But issues still remain about the use of citations in ranking systems, especially the fact that the arts and humanities generate comparatively few citations.^[13]

QS has conceded the presence of some data collection errors regarding citations per faculty in previous years' rankings.^[14]

One interesting issue is the difference between the Scopus and Thomson Reuters databases. For major world universities, the two systems capture more or less the same publications and citations. For less mainstream institutions, Scopus has more non-English language and smaller-circulation journals in its database. But as the papers there are less heavily cited, this can also mean fewer citations per paper for the universities that publish in them.^[13] This area has been criticized for undermining universities which do not use English as their primary language.^[15] Citations and publications in a language different from English are harder to come across. The English language is the most internationalized language and therefore the most popular when citing.

Recruiter review (10%)

This part of the ranking is obtained by a similar method to the Academic Peer Review, except that it samples recruiters who hire graduates on a global or significant national scale. The numbers are smaller – 16,875 responses from over 130 countries in the 2011 Rankings – and are used to produce 10 per cent of any university’s possible score. This survey was introduced in 2005 in the belief that employers track graduate quality, making this a barometer of teaching quality, a famously problematic thing to measure. University standing here is of especial interest to potential students.^[16]

International orientation (10%)

The final ten per cent of a university’s possible score is derived from measures intended to capture their internationalism: five percent from their percentage of international students, and another five percent from their percentage of international staff. This is of interest partly because it shows whether a university is putting effort into being global, but also because it tells us whether it is taken seriously enough by students and academics around the world for them to want to be there.^[17]

Data sources

The information used to compile the World University Ranking comes partly from the online surveys carried out by QS, partly from Scopus, and partly from an annual information-gathering exercise carried out by QS itself. QS collects data from universities directly, from their web sites and publications, and from national bodies such as education ministries and the National Center for Education Statistics in the US and the Higher Education Statistics Agency in the UK.

Aggregation

The data are aggregated into columns according to its Z score, an indicator of how far removed any institution is from the average. Between 2004 and 2007 a different system was used whereby the top university for any measure was scaled as 100 and the others received a score reflecting their comparative performance. According to QS, this method was dropped because it gives too much weight to some exceptional outliers, such as the very high faculty/student ratio of the California Institute of Technology. In 2006, the last year before the Z score system was introduced, Caltech was top of the citations per faculty score, receiving 100 on this indicator, because of its highly research and science-oriented approach. The next two institutions on this measure, Harvard and Stanford, each scored 55. In other words, 45 per cent of the possible difference between all the world's universities was between the top university and the next one (in fact two) on the list, leaving every other university on Earth to fight over the remaining 55 per cent.

Likewise in 2005, Harvard was top university and MIT was second with 86.9, so that 13 per cent of the total difference between all the world's universities was between first and second place. In 2011, the University of Cambridge was top and the second institution, Harvard, got 99.34. So the Z score system allows the full range of available difference to be used in a more informative way.

Classifications

In 2009, a column of classifications was introduced to provide additional context to the rankings tables. Universities are classified by size, defined by the size of the student body; comprehensive or specialist status, defined by the range of faculty areas in which programs are offered; and research activity, defined by the number of papers published in a five-year period.

Fees

In 2011, QS began publishing average fees data for the universities it ranks. These, however, are not used as an indicator in the rankings.

QS publishes domestic and international fees for undergraduate and postgraduate study.

Faculty-level analysis

QS publishes a simple analysis of the top 400 institutions in each of the five faculty-level areas mentioned above: natural sciences, technology, biology and medicine, social sciences and the arts and humanities. These five tables list universities in order of their Academic Peer Review score. They also give the citations per paper for each institution, but the two data sets are not aggregated.

QS uses citations per paper rather than per person partly because it does not hold details of the academic staff in each subject area, and partly because the number of citations per paper should be a consistent indicator of impact within a specific field with a defined publishing culture.

Major rankings

Overall rankings

QS publishes a ranking of just over 700 of the top universities around the world, the first 50 of which are listed below (according to the latest result):

QS World University Rankings — Top 50

2013/14[18]	2012/13[19]	2011/12[20]	2010/11[21]	Institute	Region
1	1	3	5	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States
2	3	2	2	Harvard University	United States
3	2	1	1	University of Cambridge	United Kingdom
4	4	7	4	University College London	United Kingdom
5	6	6	7	Imperial College London	United Kingdom
6	5	5	6	University of Oxford	United Kingdom
7	15	11	13	Stanford University	United States
8	7	4	3	Yale University	United States
9	8	8	8	University of Chicago	United States
10	10	12	9	California Institute of Technology	United States
10	9	13	10	Princeton University	United States
12	13	18	18	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich)	Switzerland
13	12	9	12	University of Pennsylvania	United States
14	11	10	11	Columbia University	United States
15	14	15	16	Cornell University	United States
16	16	16	17	Johns Hopkins University	United States
17	21	20	22	University of Edinburgh	United Kingdom
17	19	23	29	University of Toronto	Canada
19	29	35	32	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)	Switzerland
19	26	27	21	King's College London	United Kingdom
21	18	17	19	McGill University	Canada
22	17	14	15	University of Michigan	United States
23	20	19	14	Duke University	United States
24	25	28	31	National University of Singapore	Singapore
25	22	21	28	University of California, Berkeley	United States
26	23	22	23	The University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
27	24	26	20	Australian National University	Australia
28	34	33	33	Ecole Normale Supérieure	France
29	27	24	26	Northwestern University	United States
30	28	30	27	University of Bristol	United Kingdom
31	36	31	38	The University of Melbourne	Australia
32	30	25	24	The University of Tokyo	Japan
33	32	29	30	The University of Manchester	United Kingdom
34	33	40	40	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	Hong Kong
35	35	32	25	Kyoto University	Japan
35	37	42	50	Seoul National University	South Korea
37	38	41	48	University of Wisconsin-Madison	United States
38	39	38	37	The University of Sydney	Australia
39	40	37	42	The Chinese University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
40	31	34	35	University of California, Los Angeles	United States
41	41	36	36	Ecole Polytechnique	France
41	47	58	74	Nanyang Technological University	Singapore
43	46	48	43	The University of Queensland	Australia
44	43	44	41	New York University	United States
45	51	52	45	University of Copenhagen	Denmark
46	44	46	47	Peking University	China
47	42	39	39	Brown University	United States
48	48	47	54	Tsinghua University	China
49	45	51	44	University of British Columbia	Canada
50	55	53	51	Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg	Germany

• For the full list, see the official website.
• For the rankings before 2010, see the articles about results of the THE-QS World University Rankings:

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2004

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2005

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2006

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2007

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2008

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2009

Rankings by subjects

QS also ranks universities by subject, with 30 such rankings appearing in 2013. These rankings are drawn up on the basis of academic opinion, recruiter opinion and citations. Different academic disciplines are sorted into five big categories: Arts & Humanities, Engineering & Technology, Life Sciences& Medicine, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences & Management, each of which shows the top 200 universities in that particular field.

QS University Subject Rankings' categories^[22]

Art & Humanities	Engineering & Technology	Life Sciences & Medicine	Natural Sciences	Social Sciences
Discipline	Discipline	Discipline	Discipline	Discipline
Philosophy	Computer Science & Information Systems	Medicine	Physics & Astronomy	Statistics & Operational Research
Modern Languages	Chemical Engineering	Biological Sciences	Mathematics	Sociology
Geography	Civil & Structural Engineering	Psychology	Environmental Sciences	Politics & International Studies
History	Electrical & Electronic Engineering	Pharmacy & Pharmacology	Earth & Marine Sciences	Law
Linguistics	Mechanical, Aeronautical & Manufacturing Engineering	Agriculture & Forestry	Chemistry	Economics & Econometrics
English Language & Literature			Materials Sciences	Accounting & Finance
				Communication & Media Studies
				Education

QS Top 50 under 50

QS releases a list of QS Top 50 under 50 annually to rank those universities which have established for not more than 50 years. This league table is based on their position in the QS World University Rankings of the previous year.^[23]

Regional rankings

QS Asian University Rankings

In 2009, QS launched the QS Asian University Rankings or QS University Rankings: Asia in partnership with The Chosun Ilbo newspaper in Korea to rank universities in Asia independently.

These rankings use some of the same criteria as the world rankings, but there are changed weightings and new criteria. One addition is the criterion of incoming and outgoing exchange students. Accordingly, the "QS World University Rankings" and the "QS Asian University Rankings" released in the same academic year are different and independent of each other.^[1] For example, the University of Hong Kong being 22nd and 23rd worldwide in the year of 2011 and 2012 was regarded as the best tertiary institution in Asia by the QS World University Rankings,^[19][20] while the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology topped the tables of the QS Asian University Rankings in 2011 and 2012.^[24][25]

The QS Asian University Rankings rank the top few hundred tertiary institutes in Asia, the first 50 of which are as follows:

QS Asian University Rankings — Top 50

2013[26]	2012[24]	2011[25]	2010[27]	2009[28]	Institute	Region
1	1	1	2	4	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	Hong Kong
2	3	2	1	1	The University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
2	2	3	3	10	National University of Singapore	Singapore
4	4	6	6	8	Seoul National University	South Korea
5	6	13	12	10	Peking University	China
6	7	11	13	7	Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology	South Korea
7	5	5	4	2	The Chinese University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
7	9	12	14	17	Pohang University of Science and Technology	South Korea
9	8	4	5	3	The University of Tokyo	Japan
10	10	7	8	5	Kyoto University	Japan
10	17	17	18	14	Nanyang Technological University	Singapore
12	12	15	15	18	City University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
13	13	9	11	9	Tokyo Institute of Technology	Japan
14	15	16	16	15	Tsinghua University	China
15	11	8	7	6	Osaka University	Japan
16	16	18	19	25	Yonsei University	South Korea
17	14	9	9	13	Tohoku University	Japan
18	18	14	10	12	Nagoya University	Japan
19	21	26	29	33	Korea University	South Korea
20	22	18	17	15	Kyushu University	Japan
21	24	27	43	44	Sungkyunkwan University	South Korea
22	20	21	21	22	National Taiwan University	Taiwan
23	19	21	24	26	Fudan University	China
24	23	20	22	20	Hokkaido University	Japan
25	26	30	30	38	The Hong Kong Polytechnic University	Hong Kong
26	27	24	25	24	University of Science and Technology of China	China
27	29	33	34	29	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	China
28	28	27	32	32	Zhejiang University	China
29	28	29	27	27	Nanjing University	China
30	49	52	71	74	National Chiao Tung University	Taiwan
31	31	31	34	40	National Tsing Hua University	Taiwan
32	30	24	23	20	Keio University	Japan
33	35	39	42	39	Universiti Malaya	Malaysia
34	32	23	20	19	University of Tsukuba	Japan
35	41	42	62	57	Kyung Hee University	South Korea
36	33	44	49	46	Hanyang University	South Korea
37	37	32	31	43	National Cheng Kung University	Taiwan
38	36	37	39	36	Indian Institute of Technology Delhi	India
39	34	38	36	30	Indian Institute of Technology Bombay	India
40	40	45	48	42	Ewha Womans University	South Korea
41	39	35	26	23	Kobe University	Japan
42	38	34	28	30	Mahidol University	Thailand
43	48	49	45	73	Hong Kong Baptist University	Hong Kong
44	42	46	39	37	Waseda University	Japan
45	50	40	41	47	National Yang Ming University	Taiwan
46	45	64	89	110	Beijing Normal University	China
47	44	41	38	28	Hiroshima University	Japan
48	43	47	44	35	Chulalongkorn University	Thailand
49	45	43	53	49	Indian Institute of Technology Madras	India
50	64	89	na	na	Taipei Medical University	Taiwan
50	60	80	na	49	University of Santo Tomas	Philippines

• For the full list of the most recent ranking, see the official website.

QS Latin American University Rankings

The QS Latin American University Rankings or QS University Rankings: Latin America^[29] were launched in 2011. They use academic opinion (30 per cent), employer opinion (20 per cent), publications per faculty member, citations per paper, academic staff with a PhD, faculty/student ratio and web visibility (10 per cent each) as measures. These criteria were developed in consultation with experts in Latin America, and the web visibility data come from Webometrics . This ranking showed that the University of São Paulo in Brazil is the region's top institution. It was first in the first and second editions in 2011 and 2012 respectively.

QS University Rankings: BRICS

QS collaborates with the Russian News to launch the third regional rankings regarding the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), known as the QS University Rankings: BRICS. This ranking adopts 8 indicators, which are derived from but different in weightings to those of the world rankings, to select the top 100 higher learning institutions in these regions. The BRICS ranking only takes mainland China's universities into account, excluding other Greater China places' such as those in Hong Kong and Taiwan.^[30]

QS University Rankings: BRICS — Top 50^[30]

2013	Institution	Region
1	Tsinghua University	China
2	Peking University	China
3	Lomonosov Moscow State University	Russia
4	Fudan University	China
5	Nanjing University	China
6	University of Science and Technology of China	China
6	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	China
8	Universidade de São Paulo	Brazil
9	Zhejiang University	China
10	Universidade Estadual de Campinas	Brazil
11	University of Cape Town	South Africa
12	Beijing Normal University	China
13	Indian Institute of Technology Delhi	India
14	Saint-Petersburg State University	Russia
15	Indian Institute of Technology Bombay	India
16	Indian Institute of Technology Madras	India
17	Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur	India
18	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	India
19	Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro	Brazil
20	Sun Yat-sen University	China
21	Xi'an Jiaotong University	China
22	Novosibirsk State University	Russia
23	Harbin Institute of Technology	China
23	Nankai University	China
25	Universidade Estadual Paulista "Júlio de Mesquita Filho"	Brazil
26	Wuhan University	China
27	Tongji University	China
28	Shanghai University	China
29	Universidade Federal de São Paulo	Brazil
30	Stellenbosch University	South Africa
31	University of The Witwatersrand	South Africa
32	Beihang University	China
33	Bauman Moscow State Technical University	Russia
34	Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee	India
35	Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais	Brazil
36	Pontificia Universidade Católica de São Paulo	Brazil
37	Moscow State Institute of International Relations	Russia
38	Universidade Federal do Rio Grande Do Sul	Brazil
39	Beijing Institute of Technology	China
40	Xiamen University	China
41	Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro	Brazil
42	Renmin University of China	China
43	University of Pretoria	South Africa
43	Tianjin University	China
43	Beijing Jiaotong University	China
43	Universidade Federal de São Carlos	Brazil
47	Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University	Russia
48	Universidade de Brasilia	Brazil
48	Huazhong University of Science and Technology	China
50	National Research University – Higher School of Economics	Russia

QS Stars

QS also offers universities a way of seeing their own strengths and weaknesses in depth. Called QS Stars, this service is separate from the QS World University Rankings. It involves a detailed look at a range of functions which mark out a modern university. Universities can get from one star to five, or Five Star Plus for the truly exceptional.

QS Stars ratings are derived from scores on eight criteria. They are: ● Research Quality ● Teaching Quality ● Graduate Employability ● University Infrastructure ● Internationalisation ● Innovation and knowledge transfer ● Third mission activity, measuring areas of social and civic engagement ● Special criteria for specific subjects

Stars is an evaluation system, not a ranking. About 100 institutions had opted for the Stars evaluation as of early 2013. In 2012, fees to participate in this program were $9850 for the initial audit and an annual license fee of $6850.^[31]

Commentary

Several universities in the UK and the Asia-Pacific region have commented on the rankings positively. Vice-Chancellor of New Zealand's Massey University, Professor Judith Kinnear, says that the Times Higher Education-QS ranking is a "wonderful external acknowledgement of several University attributes, including the quality of its research, research training, teaching and employability." She said the rankings are a true measure of a university's ability to fly high internationally: "The Times Higher Education ranking provides a rather more and more sophisticated, robust and well rounded measure of international and national ranking than either New Zealand's Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) measure or the Shanghai rankings."^[32] In September 2012 the British newspaper The Independent described the QS World University Rankings as being "widely recognised throughout higher education as the most trusted international tables".^[33]

Martin Ince,^[34] chair of the Advisory Board for the Rankings, points out that their volatility has been reduced since 2007 by the introduction of the Z-score calculation method and that over time, the quality of QS's data gathering has improved to reduce anomalies. In addition, the academic and employer review are now so big that even modestly ranked universities receive a statistically valid number of votes. QS has published extensive data ^[35] on who the respondents are, where they are, and the subjects and industries to which the academicians and employers respectively belong.

General criticisms

Many are concerned with the use or misuse of survey data.

Since the split from Times Higher Education, further concerns about the methodology QS uses for its rankings have been brought up by several experts. Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at University of Melbourne and a member of the THE editorial board, in the article "Improving Latin American universities' global ranking" for University World News on 10 June 2012, said: "I will not discuss the QS ranking because the methodology is not sufficiently robust to provide data valid as social science." ^[36]

In an article for the New Statesman entitled "The QS World University Rankings are a load of old baloney", David Blanchflower, a leading labour economist, said: "This ranking is complete rubbish and nobody should place any credence in it. The results are based on an entirely flawed methodology that underweights the quality of research and overweights fluff... The QS is a flawed index and should be ignored." ^[37]

In an article titled The Globalisation of College and University Rankings and appearing in the January/February 2012 issue of Change magazine, Philip Altbach, professor of higher education at Boston College and also a member of the THE editorial board, said: “The QS World University Rankings are the most problematical. From the beginning, the QS has relied on reputational indicators for half of its analysis … it probably accounts for the significant variability in the QS rankings over the years. In addition, QS queries employers, introducing even more variability and unreliability into the mix. Whether the QS rankings should be taken seriously by the higher education community is questionable."^[38]

The QS World University Rankings have been criticised by many for placing too much emphasis on peer review, which receives 40 percent of the overall score. Some people have expressed concern about the manner in which the peer review has been carried out.^[39] In a report,^[40] Peter Wills from the University of Auckland, New Zealand wrote of the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings:

But we note also that this survey establishes its rankings by appealing to university staff, even offering financial enticements to participate (see Appendix II). Staff are likely to feel it is in their greatest interest to rank their own institution more highly than others. This means the results of the survey and any apparent change in ranking are highly questionable, and that a high ranking has no real intrinsic value in any case. We are vehemently opposed to the evaluation of the University according to the outcome of such PR competitions.

QS points out that no survey participant, academic or employer, has been offered a financial incentive to respondents. And academics cannot vote for their own institution.

THES-QS introduced several changes in methodology in 2007 which were aimed at addressing these criticisms,^[41] the ranking has continued to attract criticisms. In an article^[42] in the peer-reviewed BMC Medicine authored by several scientists from the US and Greece, it was pointed out:

If properly performed, most scientists would consider peer review to have very good construct validity; many may even consider it the gold standard for appraising excellence. However, even peers need some standardized input data to peer review. The Times simply asks each expert to list the 30 universities they regard as top institutions of their area without offering input data on any performance indicators. Research products may occasionally be more visible to outsiders, but it is unlikely that any expert possesses a global view of the inner workings of teaching at institutions worldwide. Moreover, the expert selection process of The Times is entirely unclear. The survey response rate among the selected experts was only <1% in 2006 (1,600 of 190,000 contacted). In the absence of any guarantee for protection from selection biases, measurement validity can be very problematic.

Alex Usher, vice president of Higher Education Strategy Associates in Canada, commented:

Most people in the rankings business think that the main problem with The Times is the opaque way it constructs its sample for its reputational rankings - a not-unimportant question given that reputation makes up 50% of the sample. Moreover, this year's switch from using raw reputation scores to using normalized Z-scores has really shaken things up at the top-end of the rankings by reducing the advantage held by really top universities - University of British Columbia (UBC) for instance, is now functionally equivalent to Harvard in the Peer Review score, which, no disrespect to UBC, is ludicrous. I'll be honest and say that at the moment the THES Rankings are an inferior product to the Shanghai Jiao Tong’s Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Academicians have also been critical of the use of the citation database, arguing that it undervalues institutions which excel in the social sciences. Ian Diamond, former chief executive of the Economic and Social Research Council and now vice-chancellor of the University of Aberdeen and a member of the THE editorial board, wrote to Times Higher Education in 2007, saying:^[43]

The use of a citation database must have an impact because such databases do not have as wide a cover of the social sciences (or arts and humanities) as the natural sciences. Hence the low position of the London School of Economics, caused primarily by its citations score, is a result not of the output of an outstanding institution but the database and the fact that the LSE does not have the counterweight of a large natural science base.

The most recent criticism of the old system came from Fred L. Bookstein, Horst Seidler, Martin Fieder and Georg Winckler in the journal Scientomentrics for the unreliability of QS's methods:

Several individual indicators from the Times Higher Education Survey (THES) data base the overall score, the reported staff-to-student ratio, and the peer ratings—demonstrate unacceptably high fluctuation from year to year. The inappropriateness of the summary tabulations for assessing the majority of the “top 200” universities would be apparent purely for reason of this obvious statistical instability regardless of other grounds of criticism. There are far too many anomalies in the change scores of the various indices for them to be of use in the course of university management.^[44]

Subject rankings reliability

The QS subject rankings have been dismissed as unreliable by some critics, including most notably Brian Leiter, who points out that programmes which are known to be high quality, and which rank highly in the Blackwell rankings (e.g., the University of Pittsburgh) fare poorly in the QS ranking for reasons that are not at all clear.^[45][46]

In other areas, QS has highly ranked programmes which do not exist,^[47] as in Geography, in which 5 of the top 10 did not actually have graduate programmes in geography. In Linguistics, the QS rankings are entirely out of step with the most recent NRC rankings; NRC ranks the doctoral programmes of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Maryland at College Park among the very best in the U.S.A. (tied for #3 in S-Rank), while QS ranks them 29th and 49th in the world, respectively.^[48]

Notes and references

External links

• Quacquarelli Symonds official website
• Full rankings 2011/12
• QS Intelligence Unit Blog — blog on rankings and higher education from the team that compiles the QS World University Rankings
• Interactive maps comparing the QS World University Rankings with the Academic Ranking of World Universities and Times Higher Education rankings

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