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What We Talk About When We Talk About Rankings

What do rankings really mean to you? We explore the meaning and impact behind these crucial metrics on institutions' decisions and perceptions.

By Anton John Crace

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"Rankings are an opportunity to celebrate excellence, benchmark progress and inspire innovation. They enable institutions to learn from each other's strengths."
With students looking at the rankings, universities are themselves paying closer attention as they hope to recruit international students.
“We subscribe to the position that, as the statistician George Box said, essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

“Rankings spark conversations,” says Dr Alison Lloyd, Associate Provost (Institutional Data and Research) at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “To me, rankings are an opportunity to celebrate excellence, benchmark progress and inspire innovation. They enable institutions to learn from each other's strengths.”

There’s an old adage, which differs depending on who tells it, that if ten people are asked to define something, they’ll give ten different answers. This can be applied to world university rankings.

Originally developed to provide students with more insight and information to help them choose which university to study at, over its history, the conversations around the QS World University Rankings have evolved.

Now, many universities, governments and employers are looking at rankings to understand the global higher education market. When vice chancellors, ministers or CEOs talk about rankings, they could be talking about research impact, national and global benchmarking, employment outcomes, student recruitment or any selection of many other things.

With more than 60,000 data points in the 2026 edition alone, there is a lot to discuss.

Student Origins

For the conversations, and sometimes arguments, they spark, it's worth remembering that formal university league tables have had a relatively short history compared to the longevity of higher education. While QS’ World University Rankings, originally published in partnership with Times Higher Education, have become the most popular at least among students, they weren’t the first, and have only existed for just over 20 years.

“When we kicked off the rankings at the beginning, [the idea] had been talked about for a while,” says Ben Sowter, Senior Vice President of QS. “The Shanghai Ranking [also known as the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)] had come out in 2003, and it was very focused on research and Nobel prizes. There was a sense that something… a little bit more relevant for students might create interest as an engaging piece of content.”

Sowter was the chief architect of the rankings at the time of their development and now oversees the business division of QS responsible for them. He says that when the rankings first came out, their intent as well as the higher education and information landscapes were significantly different to today.

“The first edition wasn't intended to be much more than that. In 2004, we were post dot-com boom, but most of the social media that we're familiar with today hadn't yet been initiated,” he says.

“It was just a way to bring more students into our ecosystem and talk to them about an important decision.”

Overtime, however, he says QS noticed the conversation around rankings changing, prompting the rankings to adapt, a relationship between users and rankings that he characterises as symbiotic. One example of this is the shift rankings took early on away from graduate education towards a broader synthesis of global international education in response to more undergraduate and international students taking notice.

With students looking at the rankings, universities are themselves paying closer attention as they hope to recruit international students.

Ts. Nur Zahdi Aldin is Director of Quality Management at the Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation (APU) in Malaysia. He first interacted with rankings roughly 10 years ago, when working at UCSI, also in Malaysia. While he views the rankings primarily through a student recruitment lens, he tells QS Insights Magazine that the Malaysian context is different from more established destination markets, where international education developed somewhat organically.

“At that moment in time, [UCSI]… foresaw the number of [Malaysian] student enrolments dropping in the country,” he says. “True enough, it happened a few years after that, and local enrolment numbers dropped to a very worrying level.”

In response to the declines in local student numbers, he says, UCSI began to explore new strategies to sustain revenue flows. “I started to look into the different methodologies of different ranking providers, THE, QS and… others,” he says. “We wanted to get more international students to come.”

Benchmarking and Partnerships

The first challenge for Aldin and UCSI in using the rankings to help attract international students was entering them. He says through analysis and interpretation of the results, indicators and methodologies, they concluded that UCSI needed to focus on research, and area that it hadn’t been particularly involved in. As a private university which needs to balance cash flows, and a primarily teaching focussed institution at that, this proved challenging.

Over the period of several years, however, Aldin says the university was able to attract international staff, researchers and PhD students, as well as “invest in staff education by sponsoring the PhD studies” which eventually led to its admittance into the rankings in the 2019 edition.

“The methodologies of ranking bodies actually help in the sense that it directs us to the areas that count the most for students, as well as for benchmarking purposes,” he says.

In terms of using the rankings to understand local and global benchmarking, some universities have elevated it into an artform. Saint Joseph's University of Beirut (USJ) in Lebanon is an example of one with an entire committees dedicated to understanding and breaking down the rankings data.

“The data collection that we do, the analysis, reviewing the results, the comparison locally and internationally [is] a whole process” says Ursala El Hage, Director of the Career and Placement Office and the Entrepreneurship Center. “It's a whole process that would take the whole year... it’s continuous.”

El Hage tells QS Insights Magazines that the committee continues to look at the results to establish strategies and actions to be taken to execution completely outside of student recruitment.

“In the ranking, not as much as the general ranking [but regional and subject rankings], there are some indicators that are interesting to look at to do a benchmark comparison with local and international universities,” she says, pointing to the citations per paper and sustainability metrics. “It's interesting to see how you compare, and what's the position of the university.”

While USJ’s rankings committee isn’t necessarily focussed on international student recruitment, El Hage says inclusion has obvious benefits in demonstrating an institution’s capabilities to a number of stakeholders, including students.

For Aldin, this demonstration of ability has helped provide meaning to potential partners. When both his former institution, UCSI, and his current institution, APU, first entered the rankings, it began to open doors.

“When we were not ranked, every time we reached out to top universities or any ranked universities higher than us, the e-mail will not even get answered,” he says. “But the moment we are in the rankings it got easier.”

Critical Friends of the Rankings

Jingwen Mu describes herself as both an insider and, while perhaps not an outsider, an invested stakeholder in rankings. Currently Director of Institutional Research and Strategic Planning at Hong Kong Baptist University, earlier in her career, she served as Consulting Manager and Partner at ShanghaiRanking.

Having worked on rankings, developing indicators and methodologies for the ARWU, and in an institution that is ranked, she has a unique point of view, and if she isn’t an outsider, she certainly sees herself as “rankings’ critical friend”.

“I think that's important,” she says, “because you want people to be provocative and be able to think how rankings can improve.”

While she wants to advance the rankings, she also has concerns around rankings literacy. “What keeps rankings dynamic is that people have to understand it,” she says.

“One concern that I observed across different regions is when ranking results are well celebrated, but what makes up the ranking is not well understood.” Mu has witnessed this herself in the institutions that she’s worked for, when, having shared the news of the latest rankings results, “only one or two tend to say, ‘there seems to be some methodological changes and tell me what we can do’”.

“I value a treasure of those questions because that's the ‘how’ part. And we want more people to ask the ‘how’,” she says.

Mu is not alone in her critiques. “[Rankings] offer this easy way to transact,” says Dave Amor, Director at Higher Insights, a research and data analysis consultancy that he founded in the UK. “[But] when your vision is to be holistic and provide students with as much information as possible, and tailor decision making as much to their needs as possible, [rankings] are also a kind of a rod for your back.”

Amor has been interacting with rankings since his early career and like Aldin, noticed how they could broker partnerships and improve student recruitment. In one example, when the university he previously worked at topped one of the British domestic rankings, the “floodgates opened”.

“It's kind of frustrating that I couldn't communicate attractiveness and strength of this university, and then overnight, a new rankings come out and all of a sudden, lots and lots of people want to go,” he observes. “It’s created a very unequal playing field for student recruitment.”

Moreso, Amor tells QS Insights Magazine that while he sees value in rankings, he has significant fears that they help to drive behaviours that harm the higher education sector.

Some of the concerns he points to include universities overinvesting in improving their position within the rankings, and rankings themselves reinforcing hierarchies of prestige in higher education. While he doesn’t think rankings will go away, Amor says rankings need to adapt to the needs of students.

“It would be nice if there was a view on what kind of rankings serve students better,” he says. “I think we should have an ambition to be more open and transparent and offer lenses that better suit certain segments of rankings audiences.”

Ultimately, Amor wants to ensure an equitable and fair higher education sector, and he urges rankers to exercise corporate responsibility and to not work inside their own echo chambers. He also urges institutions to keep their students and communities at their core.

“When we talk about criticism in the round, QS agrees with almost all of it,” says Sowter. “Obviously taking a really complex set of quite different institutions and whittling them all down to a single number is simplistic and reductionist.”

Throughout their history, Sowter has heard a lot of criticism about the rankings. But, he says: “We subscribe to the position that, as the statistician George Box said, essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

According to Sowter, taking this mindset comes close to Amor’s calls for adaptation. “If you're going to accept that all models are wrong, but some are useful, you've got a perennial responsibility to try and make them more useful.”

One example of this, he notes, is that rankings look backwards on what has happened to influence the present, rather than looking at the current day to influence the future.

Mu, Amor and Sowter, also agree that while the rankings have limitations, they do something unique.

“There are not many internationally comparable indicators,” says Mu.

“In the national context, we have richer context of there's a national teaching exercise, there are other things you can compare. But it is not easy to make up an international ranking to pick things that are internationally comparable.”

What We Talk About When We Talk About Rankings

“I think when we talk about rankings, we have to be very clear what purpose the rankings serve,” says Mu. “It can be to inform the students. It can also be... to understand the relative standing of universities in terms of their research.”

The conversations that rankings spark range across a number of different areas. From student choice, to university performance, to concerns of their influence, they continue to mean many things to many different people.

Those talking about them share a desire to see the sector improve and meet the needs of students, researchers, the community and society as a whole.

“I see the ranking as a tool and not an objective per se,” says USJ’s El Hage. “Considering the the different rankings, how can we benefit the most from their existence and their presence?”

“When I talk about the work of QS… it always comes back to the simple purpose at the heart of our mission,” says Sowter. “Empowering people to fulfil their potential.”

“When I'm talking about the rankings, I'm talking about changing the world.”