To the OP, I took the liberty of looking at a few more world rankings.
The 'Academic Ranking of World Universities' uses a formula as such: "alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (10 percent), staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (20 percent), highly-cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories (20 percent), articles published in Nature and Science (20 percent), the Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index (20 percent) and the per capita academic performance (on the indicators above) of an institution (10 percent)". The creators explained that that is for only finding academic and
research performance.
I don't see anything there that has any direct relevance to an undergrad student.
The 4icu.org Ranking ranks by web popularity. Again, absolutely nothing relevant to learning environments for undergrad students.
And the prestigious 'Times Higher Education World University Rankings' has 13 separate performance indicators. 30% of the overall ranking score is based on the learning environment.
Reputation, income and research volume is worth 30%. But do we really care about that as an undergrad student? In my opinion, no - because it has nothing to do with my experience at university. Research influence is worth 32.5%, and that is absolutely useless for us as well - because it counts the times that an academic work by a person at the university was cited. Again, nothing to do with what I'm going to do in undergrad work. International mix? Not much as well - but that has 5% weighting.
A picture is below that explains their methodology:
So on the surface, it appears only 30% of their factors directly influences us. But let's look at that more closely.
PhD awards per academic? 6%? A good lecturer doesn't have to be a PhD to be good. So let's lessen that to 24% of their ranking has direct relevance to undergrad students.
Income per academic? 2.25%? What does that have to do with anything?
Say the same thing for ratio of PhD awards to bachelors awards... that has little to no relevance at all. Perhaps only the reputational survey of teaching and undergraduates admitted per academics - totalling 19.5% of the Times rankings has any direct relevance to us.
So can you see why I don't trust these world rankings as much as some people here say I should?
