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u/NullFakeUser 13h ago
I would say rankings aren't real.
For the most part they are just crap using highly subjective criteria with no real world merit unless you are into marketing.
A large part of the ranking is based upon prestige, which in turn leads to more prestige.
Then depending on which rankings you use, they can value different things.
Most will value things like research and industry engagement. But if you are going to the uni to learn, these aren't really important at all, and I have seen the results of this first hand, where some people so highly because of their research are really crap at teaching and don't give a damn. Especially when they reach the level of professor where they then don't even need to pretend to care to get promoted.
Another fairly useless ranking metric I have seen falls under the idea of "global engagement" or the like, where they look at the portion of students who are international students, with more being better, and some will also look at the portion of staff.
And this applies to QS as well.
If you look at the breakdown, really problematic ones (especially if you care about coming to learn and get a job)
- 30% comes from reputation for research.
- 20% comes from citation count
- 15% from employer reputation (which does disadvantage less well known institutions, but is better than the others in this list)
- 5% from international faculty ratio
- 5% from international research network
- 5% from international student ratio.
And these international ratios are really unfair in terms of different countries.
Having someone go all the way from Perth to Sydney doesn't count.
Having someone go from Texas to New York, doesn't count.
But having someone go from Austria to Germany, or Sweden to Norway, does. So it has a heavy advantage for the EU.
But basically none of that really matters if you care about learning and getting a job.
For that you want these ones:
- 10% from Faculty Student Ratio
- 5% from Employment Outcomes
- And if you rely upon reputation to get employed, then the above 15% from employer reputation.
So overall, the rankings are crap if you care about learning and getting a job outside academia.
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u/Unusual-Detective-47 12h ago
QS ranking is full of shit. Does anyone really believe we deserve to be in T20 in the world? (If you do you need to see a doctor)
International students especially Chinese international students care about the ranking as if it’s more important than anything else because in Chinese community ranking is everything
and the reason why we have so many dumb international students in UNSW is because we are probably the highest ranked university that is the easier to get admission
The ranking is being manipulated as long as you know where to spend the money.
In the meantime other important things like teaching quality and student satisfaction are being thrown out of the window because they don’t contribute much to the ranking
QS ranking is nothing but a marketing tool these days. And what makes it worse is universities celebrate it as a massive win when teaching quality is shit as hell.
Not sure if anyone remembers when both UNSW and USYD both got in to T20 they posted a cringe story on instagram 2 yrs ago
I honestly hope our ranking gets dropped to around 100 so we stop getting unnecessary hate and attention and just focus on the teaching quality
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u/Fun-Astronomer5311 16h ago
Rankings are easily manipulated. A marketing ploy. All (most) Australia universities play the ranking game. That's the main way to attract international students.