Written by: The Apostrophe Academy academic team
Reviewed by: The Apostrophe Academy academic team
- Published:
- Last checked at the official source:
Key takeaways
- Every ranking measures something different; read the publisher's methodology before the number.
- For an undergraduate, the subject table matters far more than the overall position.
- Official accreditation and degree recognition are requirements; ranking is a preference. Do not reverse the order.
What a ranking actually measures
The best-known global rankings are produced by private publishers, and each one publishes its methodology: different weights for research output, citations, reputation surveys of academics and employers, staff-to-student ratio, and the presence of international students and staff. Changing a single weight can move a university dozens of places from one year to the next without anything changing inside its classrooms.
The practical consequence: the number tells you more about the university's research standing than about your experience as an undergraduate inside it. That does not make it worthless — it makes it one indicator among several.
Read the subject table, not the overall rank
The publishers themselves release tables by broad subject: engineering, computer science, business, medicine and others. A university placed high in your subject is a better fit than one that sits higher overall but whose department in your field is small or newly opened.
- Open the subject table at the publisher itself, not a screenshot or a post repeating a number.
- Check the edition year: much of what circulates online is two or three years old.
- Then look at the department on the university's own site: faculty, curriculum, language of instruction, laboratories.
The order of questions we use with our students
We start from requirements and end at preferences: is the university officially recognised in its own country? Is its degree recognised for what you intend to do after graduation? Is your programme taught in a language you genuinely handle, and which language test does it ask for? Can you carry tuition and living costs for the full duration? Only after all of that does ranking come in, as a tie-breaker between two acceptable options.
Tuition, entry requirements and language scores are numbers the university owns and can change at will, so we read them from the university's official page every time and link to it from our directory instead of restating them from memory.