Your guide to the university rankings

Okay, so we’ve dropped out of the top 50, but what does that actually mean? Does our score in any league table truly reflect Warwick, and if so, how? We’ve put together an easy-to-read guide to help you understand.

QS World Rankings

Published by Quacquerelli Symonds, which specialises in education and international study, the QS World Rankings has four points of focus: research quality, graduate employability, teaching quality and international outlook. Each of these indicators is then assessed based on world reputation, faculty-student ratio, citations per faculty, international student ratio and international staff ratio. Therefore, it is highly likely that the uncertainty surrounding visas and immigration laws following Brexit has impacted our score in a number of the factors concerning our relationship with the ‘international’. It was published from 2004 to 2009 in partnership with Times Higher Education, before the latter began producing its own rankings using methodology developed in partnership with Thomson Reuters.

World University Rankings (THE)

Launched in 2010, the Times Higher Education rankings actually refer to a wide range of league tables published by the magazine. They assess international reputation, student experience and universities under fifty years of age, among others. Billing itself as “the only international university performance tables to judge world-class universities across all of their core missions”, the World University Rankings place their focus on research and knowledge transfer as well as teaching and international outlook, differentiating themselves from the more student-centric approach taken by Quacquerelli Symonds. This year, Warwick are joint at 82nd with Dartmouth College, Technical College of Berlin and Emory University.

World Reputation Rankings (THE)

In these rankings, universities are nominated by academics across the world based on their perceived prestige, without disclosing the reasons for their nomination. The result is therefore based entirely on gut instinct and esteem amongst people in the field. These tend to follow a similar order year-on-year. In 2016, Warwick shared fell in the 81-90 rubric alongside Saint Petersburg State University, London Business School and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

There is no ‘best’ league table to read, as each ranking operates by a different methodology. Instead, an overview of the principal tables will generally paint a picture of which institutions are dominating in their field. Criticism of the major league tables include a bias towards higher education providers specialising in ‘hard science’ over arts or humanities subject, and the presence of only the opinion of academics. While Oxford and Cambridge are usually the highest-ranking UK universities in the aforementioned world rankings, Loughborough topped the Student Experience Survey 2016, in which Warwick are joint with Coventry University at 35th, published by Times Higher Education.