Purpose & Approach

The thinking behind the THE -  World University Rankings and their original and enduring approach

The purpose of a university is to make students safe for ideas - not ideas safe for students

Clark Kerr, former President - University of California

Purpose of the THE - QS World University Rankings

The purpose of the THE - QS World University Rankings has been, from the start, to recognise universities as the multi-faceted organisations that they are, to provide a global comparison of their success against the notional mission of remaining or becoming world-class.

What is a "World Class University"?

The process of globalisation has changed the way we do business, change the way we interact with each other, changed the way we think and changed the way we acquire information. Businesses, in an only increasing number of ways, are competing not just locally or nationally but globally. To do so effectively, they are waging an increasingly intensive "war for talent" in order to attract the finest minds and the best-equipped future leaders to their organisations.

Universities are the principal source of talent young people and are targeted ruthlessly and strategically to renew and refresh the workforce of many of the world's leading companies. Today, that targeting is no longer limited to the home nation of the business - companies are casting the net further to draw in the right people and the right partners to further their business objectives.

As a result of this and other trends, universities themselves are increasingly being required to compete - for the best faculty, the brightest students, lucrative research contracts and even government funding. The notion of a "World Class University" is becoming ever more important to governments, employers, investors, alumni, students, applicants and the universities themselves. Without measurement it is difficult to identify which universities may qualify today, let alone how others may be able to get there tomorrow.

The Approach

In this context, the THE - QS World University Rankings were born, and, from the beginning identified 4 key pillars upon which a World Class University can be built, and as a basis for evaluation used them as criteria under which indicators have been chosen to evaluate universities globally.

These criteria or pillars are:

Research Quality

How well-respected is the output that an institution's faculty are publishing? Is the university in question a real centre of excellence in any particular discipline, world-renowned for contributing to the progress of human knowledge, thought or understanding? Indicators often considered here are domestic assessments of research quality, productivity (i.e. number of papers published), citations (i.e. how recognised and referred to by other academics are those papers), awards (e.g. Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals), highly cited authors and so on.

Teaching Quality

What is the experience like for a student in the classroom? What is the availability of the faculty like from a student perspective? Do the teaching formats facilitate or obstruct interactivity? Everybody has has a bad lecturer, and everybody knows what the impact of a great teacher can be. A key role of a university is the nurture of tomorrow's finest minds, inspiring thenext generatin of potential research academics. Typical indicators here are domestic teaching quality assessments, collation of student feedback, national student surveys, student faculty ratios and average class sizes.

Graduate Employability

Not all students see themselves become academics. Most, in fact, go out into the world seeking employment outside the academy. A rich university experience offers more than just a classroom experience, there are clubs and societies, lobby groups, international associations, voluntary organisations, sports clubs and a variety of other activities to get involved in. Not to mention a potentially rich social scene, a few thousand strangers to meet and interact with and many students' first experience of being independent and away from home. Graduate employability to talks about more than academic strength but also about work-readiness - the ability to work effectively in a multi-cultural team, to deliver presentations, to manage people and projects. Common indicators in this area are surveys of employers, graduate employment rates and average graduate salaries.

International Outlook

Does the university look beyond the borders of its own country? Does it contrbute not only to its own nation's knowledge economy but to that of humankind in general? Effective indicators could be the proportion of international students and staff, the numbers of exchange students arriving and departing, the number and strength of international partnerships with other universities or the number of graduates pursuing further study at overseas universities.



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