On 16 September, the 2014/15 edition of the QS World University Rankings® will be published here on TopUniversities.com, revealing this year’s listing of the world’s best-performing higher education institutions. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the ranking, which was first published in 2004, and which has expanded over the past decade to now feature more than 800 universities worldwide, with more than 3,000 considered for inclusion.
The ranking’s expanding size and global reach has been matched by a period of sustained growth in the number of internationally mobile students. During the last decade, overall university enrolments have increased dramatically, while the number of those studying outside of their own country has doubled.
Since the inaugural edition in 2004, the QS World University Rankings has focused on providing information of relevance for this growing number of prospective international students. It aims to cover four key performance areas of interest to prospective students: research, teaching, employability and internationalization. These are assessed via six performance indicators, including quantitative data about research citations, international enrolments and faculty, and faculty/student ratio, as well as the results of two major global surveys of academics and employers, each the largest of their kind.
While the rankings have, overall, returned notably stable results over their decade of existence, each year’s release provides a window into changing trends among the world’s most elite educational institutions – both in terms of individual competition, and broader patterns at regional and global levels. The 2014/15 edition promises no less, so watch this space for the much-awaited results on 16 September, or be among the first to discuss and debate the results at the launch event in Prague.