Rankings do matter

Dalhousie University moving up in the QS University Rankings

We’re number 235! We’re number 235! (Photo by Alex Maxwell)

What are university rankings all about and why should you care?

Each year, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a British company specializing in study abroad opportunities and higher education, releases a list of the top universities in the world. This year, Dal has made an exciting nine-spot jump from 244th to 235th in the rankings. Out of the 3,000 schools examined and the 863 that made the list, Dal is doing pretty well. While there are more than a few people who think university rankings are a complete waste of time and serve no purpose beyond a group of people telling you that some schools appear to be better than others, they actually serve as a great gateway for universities to reach students that would not normally know about them otherwise.

Leading up to selecting Dal as my top-choice university, university rankings were all I would ever speak about. While Dal was 244th in the world in last year’s rankings, they were 12th in Canada. That played a huge part in my decision to come here, as I’m sure it did for a lot of the other international students. When getting a first-hand look at the campus and the faculties is out of the question, the Internet becomes a very close friend. (QS University Rankings were definitely my best friend last year.)

So university rankings help students find the school, but how does that prove that the ranking itself is not a complete waste of time? While I will admit there are far more university ranking publications than there needs to be, some of which are massively opinionated and just generally unhelpful, QS follows a methodology in listing schools that actually contains important factors. According to the QS website, there are six distinctive indicators that make up the methodology: academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty/student ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty, and international students. Personally, I think it just makes sense to want to know if the school is actually a good school before you attend. Also, wouldn’t you want to know ahead of time if the entire biology department had a faculty to student ratio of 10:1? The QS university rankings provide us with some solid information, and even if you aren’t a fan of such rankings, it’s hard not to like that Dal is climbing the list. .