The QS World University Rankings for 2014/15 were released last Tuesday. The QS world university rankings are annual university rankings published by British Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). In this most recent release, the University of Waterloo (UW) placed 169th in overall score with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom claiming the top two spots in that category. This was an improvement of 11 spots from the 2013/2014 ranking in which UW was ranked 180th internationally.
UW claimed 51st place in North America with MIT and Harvard in the United States claiming the top two spots, and seventh in Canada where U of T and McGill took the top two spots. The Canadian ranking is much lower than the most recent rankings posted by MacLean’s University Guide which ranked Waterloo as second in the category of best overall university in Canada.
In order to come up with the QS World University Rankings, six indicators each of which is given a different percentage weighting, are combined to come up with the overall score. Four of these indicators are based on facts while the remaining two are based on surveys.
The two categories based on surveys are academic reputation and employer reputation with a percentage weighting of 40 and 10 percent respectively. In the academic reputation survey academics are asked to identify the institutions where they believe the most work is currently taking place in their field of expertise; and in the employer reputation survey, employers are asked to identify the universities they perceive as producing the best graduates.
The four remaining categories based on factual data are Student-to-faculty ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty ratio, and international student ratio with percentage weightings of 20, 20, five and five percent respectively. Student-to-faculty ratio is a measure of the number of academic staff employed relative to the number of students enrolled. Citations per faculty are measured using Scopus, the world’s largest database of research abstracts and citations. International faculty and international student ratio assess how successful a university has been at attracting students and faculty member from other nations and is based on the proportion of international students and faculty members to overall numbers.
UW ranked third in Canada in “Engineering and Technology” behind U of T and U.B.C., and second in “Computer Science and Information Technologies” in Canada behind U of T.
These rankings do matter. Despite how much their influence is downplayed, many students use rankings such as these and Maclean’s university guide when choosing which university to attend for their post-secondary studies. Unfortunately the importance of how these rankings are derived is sometimes not considered and the ranks are simply taken at face value. The four categories based on factual data are largely out of the hands of the student body here at the University of Waterloo, but the two global survey categories are an area that each and every student has the opportunity to influence. Students who graduate and enter the workforce can have a positive impact on UW’s employer reputation, while those continuing their education with graduate studies can have a positive impact on UW’s academic reputation. UW’s international reputation improves as our overall ranking continues to climb, and that looks good on everyone involved.
While we may not have cracked the top 10 universities in the world, we can all take comfort in the fact that these QS rankings rank 800 universities around the world, after assessing over 3,000.
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