QS World University Rankings

• 1. Introduction

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  The QS World University Rankings began as a collaboration between Quacquarelli Symonds and Times Higher Education magazine, first published in 2004. Thousands of students, employers, and governments now consult it each year when deciding where to study, whom to hire, and how to fund higher education. But how does a private analytics firm translate something as vast and varied as a university into a single number? And what happens when the numbers face serious scrutiny? Those are the questions at the heart of this story.

  Quacquarelli Symonds, known as QS, was founded by Nunzio Quacquarelli in 1990 with a modest but clear aim: to give students better information about studying abroad. It took fourteen years of growth before QS partnered with Times Higher Education to create the first global league table of universities. By 2009, the two organizations had parted ways, each launching its own separate rankings product. QS's first fully independent edition came out in September 2010, built on a methodology of its own design.

  Today the rankings are regarded as among the most widely read of their kind anywhere in the world, alongside the Academic Ranking of World Universities and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. According to Alexa Internet, QS held the title of most widely viewed university ranking worldwide in 2020. A firm launched to help students pick a study-abroad destination had grown into a global reference point for higher education policy.

• 2. The Methodology

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  Academic reputation carries the single heaviest weight in the QS rankings, accounting for 40% of a university's overall score. To build that indicator, QS collects more than 150,000 responses from academics in more than 140 countries and locations. The firm has previously published the job titles and geographical distribution of survey participants, but the response rates are not disclosed. QS's own statements suggest those rates fall between 2% and 8%.

  Three other indicators fill out the remaining 60%. Citations per faculty, which measures the density of research-active staff at an institution, accounts for 20%. For that calculation, QS divides total citations over a five-year period by the number of academics at the university. From 2004 to 2007, QS sourced this citation data from Thomson, then switched to Scopus, part of Elsevier. Faculty-to-student ratio and employer reputation each account for 15%, with employer reputation drawn from a survey of roughly 99,000 employers worldwide. The final 10% comes from internationalization, split equally between international student ratio and international faculty ratio.

  Starting with its 2024 edition, QS added three new indicators, each worth 5%: International Research Network, Employment Outcomes, and Sustainability. These replaced nothing; instead, they redistributed weight across the existing indicators to capture what QS describes as shifts in higher education. Since 2015, QS has also applied faculty area normalization to its citation counts, a measure designed to stop universities dominated by the natural sciences or medicine from gaining an unfair citation advantage over institutions with stronger arts and humanities programs.

• 3. A Portfolio of Tables

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  The QS World University Rankings by Subject arrived in 2011, initially covering only five subject areas. It has since expanded to more than 50 specific academic disciplines, grouped under five broad faculty areas: Arts and Humanities, Engineering and Technology, Life Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. Medicine, Business, Law, and Mathematics are among the named subject areas. The subject rankings were already using the International Research Network indicator years before QS added it to the flagship world table.

  Regional rankings fill a different need. QS launched its Asia rankings in 2009 in partnership with the Chosun Ilbo newspaper in South Korea. The Arab Region rankings followed in 2014, and Latin America in 2011. The 2024 Latin America edition was expanded to include Caribbean universities for the first time. A European rankings table launched in 2023, featuring 688 institutions from 42 member countries of the Council of Europe. One regional table has been discontinued: the Emerging Europe and Central Asia Rankings, which ran from 2015 until 2022, with Russia's Lomonosov Moscow State University holding the top position throughout its entire run.

  Beyond rankings, QS offers QS Stars, a separate auditing service that evaluates universities against roughly 50 indicators across up to 12 categories. Four categories are mandatory; institutions choose the remaining four from an optional list. A university can score anywhere from zero Stars to the maximum Five Star Plus rating. By early 2018, around 400 institutions had opted into the Stars evaluation, and about 20 had achieved the highest possible rating. In 2012, participation fees stood at $9,850 for the initial audit plus an annual license fee of $6,850.

• 4. Criticism and Controversy

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  In September 2011, the New Statesman ran a headline calling the QS rankings "a load of old baloney". The article's author, labour economist David Blanchflower, wrote that the results were "based on an entirely flawed methodology that underweights the quality of research and overweights fluff" and that the QS rankings "should be ignored". The headline was blunt, but the concerns it expressed had been building for years.

  Fred L. Bookstein, Horst Seidler, Martin Fieder, and Georg Winckler published a critique in the journal Scientometrics in October 2010, focused on statistical instability. They found that several individual indicators, including the overall score, the staff-to-student ratio, and peer ratings, showed unacceptably high fluctuation from year to year. Their conclusion was that the summary tables were not suited to assessing the majority of universities in the top 200.

  Philip Altbach, a professor of higher education at Boston College and a member of the Times Higher Education editorial board, wrote in the January/February 2012 issue of Change that the QS rankings were "the most problematical" of the major tables, pointing specifically to the heavy reliance on reputational indicators as the likely cause of the significant variability seen year to year. Simon Marginson, a professor at the University of Melbourne and also a member of the THE editorial board, said in June 2012 that he would not discuss the QS ranking because its methodology was not sufficiently robust to provide data valid as social science.

  A separate line of criticism concerns structural bias. The Scopus database, which QS uses for citation data, includes more non-English language and smaller-circulation journals than the Thomson Reuters database, but critics argue the overall citation system still skews toward English-speaking institutions. Peter Wills from the University of Auckland raised a different concern about the academic reputation survey, noting that staff are likely to rank their own institution more highly, and that financial enticements had been used to encourage participation. In 2021, research from the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley raised the possibility that universities paying for QS's consulting services received better rankings in return. QS denied this and stated it had firm policies to minimize conflicts of interest. An Independent Expert Group convened by the UN University's International Institute for Global Health in November 2023 published findings supporting the concern that institutions buying QS products and services had better chances of moving up in the rankings.

• 5. Global Reach and Events

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  Beyond the published tables, QS operates an events business that sends admissions fairs around the world. In 2019, QS hosted more than 360 events attended by 265,000 candidates across 100 cities in 50 countries. These events are organized into separate tours aimed at different applicant types: the World MBA Tour for business school candidates, the World Grad School Tour for postgraduate programs in FAME and STEM disciplines, the World University Tour for undergraduates, and the QS Connect series, which replaces open fairs with pre-arranged one-to-one interviews between candidates and admissions staff.

  The World MBA Tour is described as the world's largest series of international business school fairs, with more than 60,000 candidates attending across 100 cities and 50 countries. A premium tier of the MBA Tour restricts participation to business schools ranked in the top 200 by the QS World University Rankings, placing the rankings and the events business in direct commercial relationship with each other.

  QS has also entered into media partnerships to distribute its rankings results. Named outlets include The Guardian in the United Kingdom and Chosun Ilbo in South Korea. In 2022, Nunzio Quacquarelli, the firm's founder, was appointed as the company's president; Jessica Turner serves as chief executive officer. The development and production of the rankings themselves is overseen by Ben Sowter, QS Senior Vice President, who was ranked 40th on Wonkhe's Higher Education Power List in 2016, a list of the 50 figures Wonkhe considered most influential in British higher education.