University rankings are often used as a marketing ploy and aren't always what they seem.
University rankings are meant to be a quick way of working out the best place you can go to study a subject. There are several different rankings, but the same few schools often end up at the top.
The top three in the latest World University Rankings are Harvard, MIT, and Stanford in the US. Cambridge University topped the UK rankings and was fifth overall.
However, according to the BBC, some universities in the UK have been challenged on claims they are making about their positions in the charts.
The University of Reading, for example, has had to take down the claim that it is in the top 1% of the world's universities. A complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority said this figure could not be substantiated and could be misleading, according to the BBC. Because the university agreed to remove the claim, there will be no further formal investigation into the matter.
Universities can get away with cherry-picking statistics like these because there are many different rankings available, such as those that focus on specific subjects. Rankings often consider things like graduation and employment rates, admission requirements, scholarship opportunities, and student satisfaction, and publications and research.
If a university is particularly high in a ranking for one subject, it technically could say it is high up in the charts without being too specific about where the figure comes from.
Charles Heymann, the University of Reading's head of corporate communications, told the BBC that the ASA now needed to investigate every other UK university that claims it is in the top 1% in the world.
"Like dozens of other UK universities in recent years, we judged this put us in the top 1% out of an estimated 20,000 institutions internationally," he said. "We accept, though, the ASA's view that this could not be proved given no league table assesses every single university worldwide."
According to Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, universities' marketing departments need to ensure everything they say is robust, evidence-based, and genuinely useful.
"University rankings are strange beasts — for example, they are largely measures of research, yet they are used by students who don't generally do much original research," Hillman told Business Insider. "Between 30 and 40 UK universities currently claim to be in the top 10, which proves such claims need to be taken with a massive dose of salt while also showing just how many league tables there now are."
He added: "This whole issue will explode again next week, when the first Teaching Excellence Framework results are published, so it is a good thing that this specific case has been resolved now."
These are the top 20 in the QS World University Rankings:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US
- Stanford, US
- Harvard, US
- Cambridge, UK
- Oxford, UK
- California Institute of Technology, US
- Princeton University, US
- University of California, Berkeley, US
- University of Chicago, US
- Columbia University, US
- Yale University, US
- University of California, Los Angeles, US
- Imperial College London, UK
- Johns Hopkins University, US
- Cornell University, USA
- University of Pennsylvania, US
- The University of Tokyo, Japan
- ETH Zurich — Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland
- UCL (University College London), UK
- Tsinghua University, China
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