When it comes to choosing where to study, ranking systems can be helpful guides. They break down the criteria that universities are judged on and allow you to focus on what matters most for you. Whether you’re looking for strong academic support or global partnerships, it’s easy to find the university that will help you achieve your goals by using ranking tools.
But while rankings can be useful, they shouldn’t be the sole factor in your decision. While they’re a good place to start, there are many other factors to consider when making your choice, including the type of degree you want, the campus environment and the people you’ll be studying with.
There are around 17,500 universities in the world, and ranking systems cover only about a third of them. They tend to focus on renowned, well-established universities from developed countries, which can sometimes create the impression that there is no quality education to be found at smaller, newer universities. This misconception is further compounded by the fact that university rankings often exclude research outputs from disciplines such as social sciences and arts, which are often published in books rather than journals.
The QS World University Rankings, for example, rank only the top 250 universities in each of its 13 indicators, which includes publications and global research reputation. To create that pool of 2,346, the ranking system takes into account the results of Clarivate’s global reputation survey as well as the number of scholarly articles (reviews, papers and notes) containing affiliations to each university that were published between 2019 and 2023. This indicator also takes into account the proportion of a university’s total publications that are published in high-quality, impactful journals.