University Rankings FAQs
Frequently asked questions regarding the Times Higher - QS World University Rankings
Many of the questions repeatedly fielded are are answered here - use the search form to find the questions most pertinent to your query or browse the list at your leisure. If you still have questions then feel free to contact us.
Search FAQs
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Why were the Times Higher Education - QS World University Rankings started?
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In a nutshell, these rankings were initiated to recognise universities as the multi-faceted organisations they are. This exercise attempts to take a more holistic view than othr global evaluations. You can read more on http://www.topuniversities.com.dev.quaqs.com/worlduniversityrankings/methodology/purpose_amp_approach/
Category: Methodology: General -
Until when are applications for participation in the THE–QS World University Rankings accepted?
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The interested university needs to submit all necessary information to us by the end of March each year.
Category: Methodology: General -
What does QS stand for?
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Q stands for Quacquarelli and S stands for Symonds.
QS was founded in 1990 by Wharton MBA, Nunzio Quacquarelli with offices in London and the US. Fellow director Matt Symonds and the Paris team joined in 1994. Today, QS operates globally from offices in: London, Paris, Singapore, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney and Washington DC.
The company is an independent organization in the education industry that seeks to provide research and related services to institutions and individuals who may benefit from them. The company undertakes primary research, publishes career guides, operates a number of websites, stages education and careers fairs, seminars and forums.
Today, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) has become established as the world’s leading network for top careers and education. It links graduate, MBA and executive communities around the world with recruiters and education providers, both physical and virtual. The mission is to enable motivated people around the world to fulfil their potential by fostering international mobility, educational achievement and career development.
Category: Methodology: General -
How is ‘Number of international graduate/postgraduate students’ defined?
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It refers to the number of graduate / postgraduate students who are foreign nationals. The term ‘international’ is hereby determined by citizenship. For EU countries, this includes all foreign nationals, even nationals of other EU states. In Hong Kong, this includes students from Mainland China.
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How is ‘Number of graduate/postgraduate students’ defined?
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It is the number of students pursuing a higher-level degree (Master and Doctorate), including both taught and research postgraduates (e.g. PhD students)
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How is ‘Number of international undergraduate students’ defined?
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It is the number of undergraduate students who are foreign nationals. The term ‘international’ is hereby determined by citizenship. For EU countries, this includes all foreign nationals, even nationals of other EU states. In Hong Kong, this includes students from Mainland China. Please exclude all exchange students.
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How is ‘Number of undergraduate students’ defined?
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The number of undergraduate students refers to all students pursuing a Bachelor’s level or equivalent degree. This excludes certificates/diplomas and associate’s degrees.
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How is ‘Number of international faculty staff’ defined?
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It is the number of academic faculty staff who are of foreign nationality. The term ‘international’ is hereby determined by citizenship. For EU countries, this includes all foreign nationals, even if from another EU state. In Hong Kong, this includes professors from Mainland China. Inclusion and exclusion mirrors those for academic faculty staff.
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How is ‘Number of academic faculty staff’ defined?
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The number of academic staff is the total number of academic faculty staff who are responsible for planning, directing and undertaking teaching only, research only or both teaching and research. Please include: vice-chancellors, deputy vice-chancellors, principals, professors, heads of school, associate professors, principal lectures and tutors. Please exclude research assistants, PhD students who contribute to teaching, and exchange scholars or visiting professors who are members of another university.
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What are the conditions to create a university profile on topuniversities.com?
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Getting a basic profile on www.topuniversities.com is free for all universities. The interested institution may send us an email to rankings@qsnetwork.com, indicating the university’s name, exact address, switchboard number and general email address as well as an appointed person’s name, her/his position, department, address and contact information like email and telephone. This person will be responsible for providing us with the required information and therefore receives a login account that allows access to our online system in order to key in information about the institution.
Category: Methodology: General -
Is there a cap on the proportion of international students and faculty?
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No.
The argument for applying a cap is largely that beyond a certain level, high numbers of international students are unlikely to be a positive measure of international reputation but more a negative indication of their domestic reputation. This may be true, but since the THE - QS World University Rankings shortlist the world's leading universities at the outset this doesn't appear to be the case. With a few notable exceptions, insttutions in the study rarely exceed 30%.
Category: Methodology: International Factors -
What kind of organisations can be included in the Employer Review?
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The important factors in the employer review relate to the knowledge and experience of the respondent more than the nature of the organisation for which they work. The pre-requisite is that they have personal experience of employing graduates from university and, therefore, carry educated opinion on the relative strength of graduates from different universities.
Organisations, therefore, can be large or small, domestic or multi-national, public or private sector, respondents can be located in the same country as the university or in others. A university will gain greatest advantage where they have a particularly strong or unique relationship with a responding employer. This is the reason why institutions with clear specialist strengths seem to perform particularly well in this indicator.
Category: Methodology: Employer Review -
What are the conditions to create a university profile on topuniversities.com?
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Getting a basic profile on www.topuniversities.com is free for all universities. The interested university may send us an email to rankings@qsnetwork.com, indicating the university’s name, exact address, switchboard number and general email address as well as an appointed person’s name, her/his position, department, address and contact information like email and telephone. A login account will be issued to this person-in-charge and she/he may start to key in information about the institution.
Category: Methodology: General -
Is the list of institutions definite?
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No. We invite new institutions to make a case to us for inclusion, usually based on domestic rankings or other measures that portray their institution in a positive light relative to other institutions already included in our list. We will also examine the survey response rates and if there are institutions receiving absolutely no responses, we will consider removing them.
But, in order to make the user interface manageable, we do restrict the exercise to a finite list of institutions.
Category: Methodology: General -
Why do citations only count for 20% of the overall score?
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Whilst other ranking projects hae set forth more specificaly to evluate universities purely in terms of their scientific output, the Times Higher Education - QS World University Rankings were devised with bolder ambitions - to evaluate universities "in the round".
In order to achieve that, alternatives to sciences-biased citations indicators needed to be found and emphasized in this system. The Academic Peer Review treats Arts and Sciences even-handedly.
Category: Methodology: Citations -
Why do the rankings use five years of citations data?
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In the early years the ranking used ten years of data from the Essential Science Indicators (ESI). Feedback suggested that this lengthened the time it takes for an excellent, dynamic and productive, but young institution to reveal its excellence in the rankings. Since results are published annually, it is important to recognise contemporary excellence. Citation dynamics varyby subject, however, so it is possible in the future that the length of the citation window will differ by subject or faculty area.
Category: Methodology: Citations -
Why does the citation count for a given university not exactly match the count for the corresponding years in Scopus?
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Scopus is a constantly evolving system, bith in terms of function and content. The export taken for the rankings is a snapshot of the five years in question taken on a given date. Since journals, papers and citations are added frequently and in some cases, retrospectively, even historical numbers can change.
In addition, QS does a lot of work on the raw data to fond alternative name variants for institutions and invites institutions to supply these variants directly - aggregating their esults together even if they are treated distinctly in Scopus.
Category: Methodology: Citations -
Why do paper and citation counts vary so much year on year?
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Late in development of the 2007 rankings, this ranking project moved from using the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) from Thomson Reuters to Scopus from Elsevier. A bibliometric database of this size is vastly complex and given the file sizes involved, processing can take days. Much improvement has been made to the algorithms used to retrieve data between 2007 and 2008, eliminating double counting between disciplines and double counting between different affiliations that are ultimately attributed to the same intitution.
In many cases, this has resulted in dramatically reduced overall paper and citation counts in 2008 (and beyond). The dataset overall, however, carries a correlation co-efficient of 0.96 with 2007 and 0.93 with 2006 (where data from ESI were used). As a result, whilst the raw data may be quite different, the final scores ought to be fairly similar, depending on changes in staffing levels.
Category: Methodology: Citations -
What is the definition of research assistant that is utilized by QS?
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The important distinction for us is that staff counted as ‘research only’ should be academically involved in that research and should be likely to publish research outputs.
A research assistant, in our understanding, is any individual who is not doing own research and is therefore not likely to publish own research outputs. Said individual is (only) involved in research in terms of operation execution , such as lab technician or equipment operator. -
What is Full Time Equivalent (FTE)?
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Full –Time Equivalent (FTE) is the total number of full-time entity it would take to meet the commitments currently met by both the full-time entity and the part-time entity. If there is no part-time entity, then FTE figure is equal to the headcount figure. (Entity in this case refers to either academic staffs or students).
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Why do we need Full Time Equivalent (FTE) figures?
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The purpose of using Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) is to counter any bias universities that either have a very high or very low number of part-time students or staff.
Universities around the world have slightly different interpretations of what FTE means, but all of them are providing calculations or educated estimates that make more sense than purely using a headcount number.
As a verification guideline, we would generally expect the FTE figure to sit somewhere between the full-time headcount and the total headcount. FTE figures which are utilized to compile the rankings.
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How are Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) figures calculated?
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Figures/ headcounts calculated here are based on a full academic year.
The following is the formula for FTE used by QS:
FTE Estimate = Full-Time Headcount + 1/3 of Part-Time Headcount
Headcount is basically the number of heads.
To visualize the example:
No. of Full-time students: 10,000 headcounts
No. of Part-time students: 4,000 headcounts
No. of Full-Time Academic Staff: 5,000 headcounts
No. of Part-Time Academic Staff: 0 headcounts
Results:
FTE for Students = 10,000 + (1/3 of 4000) = 11333.33
FTE for Academic Staff = 5,000
Please note that a student can be represented more than once as an FTE.
If a student is taking a full-time program and a part-time program, he/she will be counted into the Full-Time Headcount AND Part-Time Headcount.
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How are average tuition fees calculated?
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Tuition fees is one type of charge a student has to face in higher education. Tuition fees help to pay for the cost of running a higher education institution, such as salaries for teaching staff or maintaining buildings. There are various ways of calculating the average tuition fees, like: calculation of mean by program, calculation of mean by student, calculation of median and calculation of mode. For example:
a university offers 8 programs with yearly fees of:
MA1 3200, MA2 3200 MA3 3200, MBA 11300, MA4 4300, MA5 4800, MA6 3700, MA7 8200
Mean by student
Multiply the fee level by the number of students paying this fee level and then divide by the total number of students.
Mean by program (do remove extreme outliers)
Add up all yearly fees for each program offered and divide the sum by the number of programs. Should you offer particular programs with an exceptionally high fee, please exclude them from your calculation. This mainly applies to certain medical, law or business programs.
Referring to the example this means: 3200+3200+3200+4300+4800+3700+8200 = 30600
30600 /7 = 4371
The mean by program is: 4371
Median
The median indicates the centre of the distribution and is preferable in a distribution with outliers. Following the example above it would mean:
Distribution: 3200 to 11300
All values in order: 3200+3200+3200+3700+4300+4800+8200+11300
3700+4300=8000/2=4000
The median is: 4000
Mode
The mode is the value that appears the most. In our example this would be: 3200
3200 3200 3200 3700 4300 4800 8200 11300
Category: Methodology: General -
Why is the Academic Peer Review given a weighting of 40%?
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Weightings are a subjective area of this research exercise, but in a scenario where multiple factors are being used, an essential component of how the rankings are compiled. In this context they are the responsibility of the Times Higher Education, but there are some clear reasons why this aspect carries such a significant proportion of the overall weighting.
Firstly, it's worth noting that unlike our citations per faculty score (which many commentators feel should carry greater weight) the peer review component offers an even handed perspective on the various broad subject areas - with institutional strengths in Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences able to contribute significantly to the overall view of an institution.
Secondly, the weight carried by the Peer Review would be likely to be reduced in a scenario where additional reliable indicators of institutional quality were identified.
Some commentators have suggested that a higher weighting ought to be placed on the Peer Review and Recruiter Reviews as they are aspects of the research most unique to this study and ergo most interesting.
Ultimately, in 2007, the Peer Review was compiled from over 5000 academic responses, each identifying an average of around 20 institutions as excellent in their given field providing over 100,000 distinct data points be which to evaluate the qualifying institutions. As the level of response improves the statistical strength of this measure will only develop.
Category: Methodology: Academic Peer Review -
How many responses are considered for the Academic Peer Review?
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A three year latest response mechanism is used - so we use three year's worth of responses, but if anyone responds in more than one of those three years, only their latest response is considered. This led to 5,101 responses in 2007 and 6,354 responses in 2008
Category: Methodology: Academic Peer Review -
How are the peers selected?
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For the 2004 Academic Peer Review a large database of respondents was purchased from the World Scientific and 1,300 respondents formed the universe for the first rankings.
Since then, things have moved on a bit... and the process runs as follows...
1. Previous respondents are invited to respond again - to update their opinions based on anything they may have learned since their prior response
2. We select 180,000 addresses from the World Scientific database based on balance of field prepresentaion and geography. Previous respondents to the survey are excluded.
3. We select slightly over 13,000 addresses from the International Book Information Service (IBIS) operated by Mardev (a division of Elsevier). These supplement the shortfalls of the World Scientific database - particularly in the Arts & Humanities. Again, prior respondents are excluded.
There are two ideas in play to boost the response in the future - one is an academic sign up facility to enable people to volunteer to participate in the survey and the other is an institution specific version of the survey that we would encourage university leadership to distribute to appropriate academics. Watch this space.
Respondents are not able to select their own university.
Responses are screened for junk and test entries and for any attempted manipulations from individual institutions or countries.
Category: Methodology: Academic Peer Review -
How are differing response levels from different countries handled?
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Category: Methodology: Academic Peer Review
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The 2008 survey included separate questions for international and domestic universities. How are the results combined?
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Category: Methodology: Academic Peer Review
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Why was the Employer Review only added in 2005?
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The four pillars (Research Quality, Teaching Quality, Graduate Employability and International Outlook) of the methodology were planned from the outset in 2004. Our initial attempt to survey employers in 2004, however, received insufficient response to be considered. In 2005 the response was better and it was felt appropriate to introduce a new indicator.
Since its introduction in 2005, response levels have grown rapidly due to the growing reputation of the project and the identification of additional channels through which to attract respondents.
Category: Methodology: Employer Review -
How do employers' opinions differ from the academics?
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As the response levels for both surveys improve over time the correlation between the two sets of responses is strengthening. Apart from in certain industry sectors, employers tend to be less directly interested in the research strength of an institution, yet that still seems to correlate strongly with graduate employability.
In general, the highest potential university applicants are attracted to traditional, established universities that have built their reputation on excellent research. As a result, there tends to be a strong correlation between opinions of academics when being questioned about the quality of research output and those of employers when asked about the quality of graduates.
There have been many surveys carried out at a domestic level, however, that seem to suggest that many graduates, even from top universities, lack certain expected skills - certainly general work skills such as presentation skills, teamwork and time management - but in some areas numeracy and literacy as well.
In this area, institutions with specialist strengths seem to do well amongst employers who partner with them primarily in those areas - this seems to hold true particularly for institutions with specialist strengths in technology and social sciences.
Category: Methodology: Employer Review
