The ranking that ranks no more

It was time for a new ranking. It’s always time for a new ranking you might say but what’s so special about UniRanks? Well, it was one of those meta rankings, a ranking of the rankings of world universities and therefore possibly mildly diverting. We periodically get this kind of ranking of rankings in the UK, and of course, there is the not at all subjective ranking I’ve done here before.

UniRanks brought together

• THE World University Ranking
• QS World University Ranking
• US News Best Global University
• Shanghai ARWU Ranking
• Reuters World Top 100 Innovative Universities

As they put it themselves

“UniRanks provides an easy overview of an institution performances across indicators and rankings, and is the reference University Ranking of Rankings”

Here’s the ranking from 2017

1 Stanford University
2 Harvard University
3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
4 University of Cambridge
5 University of Oxford
6 California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
7 Princeton University
8 The University of California, Berkeley (UCB)
9 Imperial College London
10 University of Chicago
11 University of Pennsylvania
12 Johns Hopkins University
13 Columbia University
14 The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
15 Yale University

The weightings across these five were as follows:

• THE World University Ranking 22.5%
• QS World University Ranking 22.5%
• US News Best Global University 22.5%
• ARWU 22.5%
• Reuters World Top 100 Innovative Universities 10%

And in terms of the distribution across nations:

The countries most represented in the World top 100 are the United States (44 institutions), the United Kingdom (13), the Netherlands and Australia (7 each), Switzerland and China (4 each). Europe claims 37 universities in the top 100, including 12 in the top 50, while Asia counts nine universities in the top 100, including 4 in the top 50.

All mildly diverting and not actually wildly different from any of the individual rankings themselves. But, I hear you ask, what do those other rankers think of someone else taking all their expensively collected and sorted data and then passing it off as their own ranking? Well, I suspect m’learned friends may have had an input as you now cannot find the UniRanks website.

So this is your last chance to see. It is an ex-ranking. It has ceased to be.