What Happened in the 2024-2025 QS World Rankings?
The 2024-2025 QS Rankings
Last year, the publication of the 2024-2025* QS World University rankings led to much argument and recrimination. Many American universities, including elite schools like Cornell, New York University (NYU), Yale, Princeton, and Chicago, recorded substantial losses. Cornell fell from 13th place to 16th, NYU from 38th to 43rd, Yale from 16th to 23rd, Princeton from 17th to 22nd, and Chicago from 11th to 21st. It was not all bad news for the USA since MIT remained at the top of the world and Harvard fourth, while Caltech rose to the top ten, but most American universities suffered a significant decline.
So what happened? Was it all because of a lack of funding or the inability of universities to get the foreign students they needed? Could it be due to the QS’s changing methodology? Or did the reputation of universities suffer from constant attacks by the right-wing media? Something to do with Trump?
It seems that US universities are searching for causes and remedies. They might be trying to move the faculty student ratio needle, which is not a good idea, as I will show in a later post, to get more international students from somewhere, to boost their global image, or to hire strategy advisors.
Back in June 2024, Ben Sowter of QS claimed that the changes were due to the long-term challenge of America’s competitors.
“This year offers the starkest signal yet that there is no guarantee whatsoever that the US’ privileged position can withstand this ambition [of Asian, Gulf and Latin American universities] indefinitely.”
True, there is a definite threat to American academic hegemony. But that does not explain exactly what happened in the QS rankings in
2024. Taking a closer look, while American universities fell, those in Asia rose, with the notable exception of Japan. Some examples include Tsinghua from 25th to 20th, Peking from 17th to 14th, Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 51st to 45th, and Fudan 50th to 39th. Some Australian universities also went up, but not so much: Monash 42nd to 37th, Melbourne 14th to 13th, and Sydney 19th to 18th.
There was no change in methodology in the 2024-2025 rankings. However, there was a delayed reaction to the changes that QS produced for the 2023 -2024 rankings.
The 2023-2024 Rankings
In June 2023, QS introduced three new indicators for the world rankings: International Research Network (IRN), which measures the breadth rather than the volume of international collaboration, Graduate Employment Rte (GER), the proportion of employed graduates 12 months after graduation, and Sustainability (SUS), assessed by 52 indicators derived from institutional and public data.
The new indicators worked quite well for US universities. Cornell, NYU, and Yale rose, and Princeton and Chicago fell slightly. The scores for the three new indicators were generally high, in the high 70s at least, sometimes in the 90s. Chicago was an exception, scoring just 61.4 for IRN.
There were big gains for Australian universities. Monash rose from 57th to 42nd, Melbourne 33rd to 14th, and Sydney 41st to 19th.
And what about China? Tsinghua fell from 14th to 25th, Peking from 12th to 17th, Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 46th to 51st, and Fudan from 34th to 50th.
In the 2023- 2024 rankings, many US universities rose moderately, many Australian universities rose a lot, and most Chinese universities fell. Take a look at the scores of top Chinese universities in the three new indicators, IRN, GER, and SUS.
Tsinghua University: 47.8, 82.2, 55.8
Peking University: 43.2, 82.6, 68.8
Shanghai Jiao Tong University: 38.3, 55.5, 44.1
Fudan University: 22.7, 49.6, 43.8.
The Chinese scores for IRN and SUS were definitely mediocre all around, while for GER, they were more mixed. It seems that China was caught unaware by the new sustainability metric, while Sydney, NYU, and Yale surged ahead. For IRN, they were also very low, and for GER, quite good, although generally still below the US and Australia.
Back to the 2024-2025 Rankings
Now, return to the QS 2024-2025 rankings published in June 2024. US universities were mostly down: Cornell from 13th to 16th, NYU from 38th to 43rd, Yale from 16th to 23rd, Princeton from 17th to 22nd, and Chicago from 11th to 21st.
And what about Australia? Monash rose from 42nd to 37th, Melbourne from 14th to 13th, and Sydney from 19th to 18th.
And China? Tsinghua went from 25th to 20th, Peking from 17th to 14th, Shanghai Jiao Tong from 51st to 45th, and Fudan from 50th to 39th. That is quite remarkable. How did they do it? There were several factors, but one that was very important was a marked improvement in the Chinese universities ’ scores for IRN and GER.
For IRN, Tsinghua went from 47.8 to 79.2, Peking from 43.2 to 79.8, Shanghai Jiao Tong from 38.3 to 73.3, and Fudan from 22.7 to 67.2.
For GER, Tsinghua went from 82.2 to 92.3, Peking from 82.6 to 94.2, Shanghai Jiao Tong from 55.5 to 73.5, and Fudan from 49.6 to 64.4.
The trend for Sustainability was more complicated. Tsinghua and Peking went down and Shanghai Jiao Tong and Fudan went up.
To conclude, what happened was that the 2023-2024 changes worked against Asian universities. South Korean universities were so incensed by the IRN indicator that they threatened to boycott the rankings. But in 2024, the leading Chinese universities had adopted and increased their scores for IRN, GER, and, in some cases, Sustainability.
QS are now talking about a new International Student Diversity metric. I suspect that we shall see something similar this year or next here as well.
This is not the complete story of US universities’ decline: something interesting is that some elite universities are getting very low scores for Citations per Faculty.
*QS calls them the 2025 rankings, although they were published in 2024. To reduce confusion I shall refer to them as the 2024-2025 rankings.