THEY are finally out. The annual roll of honor for the world’s best universities has been published and as usual Indian universities figure somewhere near the end of the scroll (in QS IIT B appears at 187). Careers360 goes behind the league tables and sees how institutions fare comparably. Before we analyse the rankings, here’s a brief on each of the ranking scheme.

QS World University Rankings
A product of QS group, a leading education and career network, this is the biggest survey-based ranking of top universities. It surveys 15,050 academics, 5007 employers whose perceptions together are given 50% weightage. 20% is given to journal citations, another 20% to student faculty ratio, and the last 10% is divided between international faculty and international students. It is in its seventh edition and until last year was working with Times Higher Education magazine. The research citations were sourced from Scopus.

Times Higher Education Rankings
A first edition, as an independent player this is one of the most comprehensive ranking systems with respect to universities. It is quite similar in structure to QS, though each broad category has much more details and data. One advantage of the THE ranking is that the institutes/ universities do participate and sign in their data. So it is richer and presents a comprehensive picture. IT also a robust survey component.
The ranking parameters are as follows:

• Teaching — learning environment, reputation (30%)
• Research — volume, income and reputation ( 30%)
• Citations — research influence(32.5  %)
• Industry income — innovation earnings ( 2.5%)
• International mix — (5%)( both faculty and students)

Academic Ranking of World Universities
As the name suggests, this is purely an academic ranking, with weights according to alumni winning Nobel prizes and Fields Medal (10%), faculty winning the same (20%), highly cited researchers (20%), publications (40%) and per capita academic performance (10%).  It is published by the Shanghai Jia Tong University, China and is now into its third edition.

The nature of the ranking schemes is such that the outcome also varies quite a bit. Take for example Imperial College. It has been ranked 26th in ARWU but a prestigious 9th and 7th in the other two rankings. In other words, Imperial College probably lost out because of its lack of laureates.

Interestingly, ARWU also throws up universities like University of California, San Diego, University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois, which are not in the popular imagination and hence not rated in the top 30 in both QS and THE.

So the prospective student must look at the parameters before he or she decides which university to pick up.