Are there any widely recognized world/country university rankings? [closed]

Question

I will be applying to study mathematics in university soon, and in order to choose which universities I should apply to I am looking at university rankings among other factors.

However, many of the university rankings that I have looked at often differ significantly, eg placing a university 10th in the world in one website and placing it 30th in the world in another website.

Is there a ranking of universities that I can rely on and that is widely accepted by academics? I am particularly interested in university rankings for the UK, as that's where I live and so I'll most likely study there.

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

There are three widely-followed world university rankings: the THE, the QS, and the ARWU. You'll find discrepancies between them of course, but given they have different methodologies, it's not surprising. Make sure you know what you're looking for and what's important to you before using them. For example, the ARWU relies heavily on Nobel Laureates & Fields Medallists as staff or alumni. If you don't care about the natural sciences or mathematics, then these things are irrelevant, and the ARWU might be less applicable to you.

I am not as familiar with regional rankings, but my understanding is that the US News and World Report rankings is widely followed within the US, while in the UK, there are another three regional rankings (The Complete University Guide, The Guardian, and The Times/The Sunday Times). Once again they use different methodologies and so reach different results. To quote:

The considerable disparity in rankings has been attributed to the different methodology and purpose of global university rankings ... International university rankings primarily use criteria such as academic and employer surveys, the number of citations per faculty, the proportion of international staff and students and faculty and alumni prize winners ... The national rankings, on the other hand, give most weighting to the undergraduate student experience, taking account of teaching quality and learning resources, together with the quality of a university's intake, employment prospects, research quality and drop-out rates.

Hopefully you can see the difficulty in ranking universities, and why different people look at different rankings. You'll have to decide what is and isn't important to you.

Answer 2

There's no "official" rankings because who would have the authority to decide on what metrics make a university the "best"?

Only a body that was appointed by universities themselves would have this authority and given that each university has a different focus, getting them to agree on a set of universal metrics to be assessed against would be nigh impossible.

That being said, the closest thing you'll get to an "official" ranking is probably The World University Rankings collated by The Times. This is done in conjunction with Elsevier which gives it some semblance of authenticity.

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A bit of advice for you specifically: university rankings don't really matter. I turned down a place at Cambridge to study part-time at Aston Uni because I preferred the lab-based approach that Aston takes to engineering degrees and I wanted to jump straight into industry. I don't regret this and I believe this hands-on experience has been far, far more useful in the long-term now I'm in industry. Furthermore, no hiring manager cares what university you went to. The days of "we only hire from Russel Group Universities" are long, long gone.

Choose your university based on where you'll be happiest and where you think the teaching style aligns most closely with your long-term goals. I'd only be concerned about ranking if they're far, far down at the wrong end. In which case look into why that's the case and decide if that matters to you.