You may have heard that the Times Higher Education World University Rankings have been recently updated for 2025, comparing over 2,000 universities worldwide across five key areas. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some familiar names crop up at the top of the list. But what exactly do these rankings mean, and how seriously should they be taken by prospective students? Let’s take a look.
How the universities are ranked
Before we take a look at the top ranked institutions, we first need to know how the ranks are decided. THE base their rankings on these five criteria:
- Teaching
- Research environment
- Research quality
- Industry engagement
- International outlook
Each of these criteria contributes a different amount to a university’s overall ranking – we’ll look at this in a little more detail later.
The best universities?
THE ranked these universities as the top five in the world:
- University of Oxford
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Harvard University
- Princeton University
- University of Cambridge
But things start to get interesting when you dive into the full scores. Oxford’s place at the top is largely bolstered by the fact that it’s ranked 1st for research environment. On the other hand, it was ranked 5th for teaching and 20th for international outlook.
So what does this tell us?
What actually matters to students
What these lists seem to say is that things like research quality and performance should matter more to students than how satisfied they are with their experience, or whether or not the university can support them in finding work once they graduate.
Which in reality, seems kind of backwards. A student in high school probably isn’t going to be involved with a university’s research department for a few years – if ever, as most students only complete degrees by coursework. In 2023, just under 220,000 Australian students graduated with an undergraduate degree, compared to around 11,000 graduating with a postgraduate research degree.
When sorting the rankings by industry, the list completely changes, with these five universities rated best:
- California Institute of Technology (7th overall)
- Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (=93rd overall)
- City University of Hong Kong (=80th overall)
- Delft University of Technology (=56th overall)
- Duke University (23rd overall)
Even when sorted by teaching quality, only 4 of the top 5 overall ranked universities make the list:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2nd overall)
- Princeton University (4th overall)
- Stanford University (6th overall)
- Harvard University (3rd overall)
- University of Oxford (1st overall)
THE also has a separate University Impact Rankings, which “identifies and celebrates universities that excel across multiple United Nations Sustainable Development Goals“. Here are the top 5 universities on that list:
- Western Sydney University (301–350th overall)
- University of Manchester (=53rd overall)
- University of Tasmania (251–300th overall)
- Aalborg University (251–300th overall)
- RMIT University (251–300th overall)
So why do the rankings change so much? It’s because they place more importance on research than any other factor.
Weighing up the rankings
As we mentioned earlier, each of the five criteria used by THE is weighted differently. This means they contribute different amounts to the university’s overall rank. Here’s how much each criteria is worth:
- Research quality (30%)
- Teaching (29.5%)
- Research environment (29%)
- International outlook (7.5%)
- Industry (3%)
This means that nearly 60% of a university’s overall ranking is based on their research alone.
Of course, a university’s research output is incredibly important – it “informs public debate, improves our health and wellbeing, and helps solve our most complex problems“. The problem is tying research output so closely to a university’s overall reputation.
Is research valuable, and should universities strive to produce quality research? Absolutely, yes. Is it a factor your average student should consider highly when choosing where to study? Probably not.
Using rankings wisely
When a student is looking at this list – and certainly when other news outlets report on the results – it’s common for them to take the overall rankings as pure fact. This can lead to the perpetuation of biases about certain universities (Kaidesoja, 2022), and at worst, deepen educational inequalities (Amsler, 2014).
Put simply, once a university is deemed “best” or “worst”, rankings like this tend to only push that bias even further.
How students and teachers should come down to their own individual situations. And this can encompass a huge variety of factors: where you live, your background, what you want to study (and why), your goals beyond university, etc.
One important thing to note is that these rankings don’t take into account student satisfaction and equity at all. And there is still further to go; lots of other factors that can impact student satisfaction and success are still too difficult to measure and compare, according to Professor Stephen Parker:
“Arguably a sixth dimension would be the staff one: what is it like to work there? No systematic and national data yet exists to provide a counterpart to the public data on student perspectives.
Possibly a seventh would be university engagement with communities, but again there is no available way to compare and contrast our universities validly on this dimension.
A still more elusive metric would be ‘value for money’.”
Finding the right university
When it comes to study, there should be many different versions of “good”. What’s good for one student might not be good for another – and that’s OK.
You shouldn’t consider any of the universities on the list “bad”, no matter where they are ranked. Where a university excels in one area, it might falter in another. It’s about taking into account your own needs and preferences and weighing them up with what a university offers.
Rather than looking up a ranking, we suggest you ask these questions to help you find the right university for you:
- What do I want to study, and where is it offered?
- Do I need to move away to study, and how far am I willing to go?
- What do other students say about their experience?
- What can I do with my qualification once I graduate?
- Does the university have support services I can access (study, social, health, and career)?
- What are the university’s policies around flexibility, online study, etc.?
- At the end of the day, what do I feel is the right choice for me?
And if you want to find out more, you can read lots of other blogs about university and study on our website.