Edinburgh, you Cheeky Ranker!

The Times Higher Education world university rankings have been released, and we take another wonderful turn on the rollercoaster-iffic merry-go-round that is University Rankings.

After the general glee at the QS rankings placing us at 17^th worldwide, it could only be that The Times give a completely different opinion. At 39^th, there is a huge different between the rankings. To add to the tomfoolery, on a national level we are placed 18^th according to thecompleteuniversityguide.com. This is obviously of the utmost logic.

So this new ranking of 39^th means we drop 7 points from last year. The conclusion being that we have at the same time improved by 4 places and dropped 7 places. Obviously. As well as there not being any correlation from board to board, there is also no consistency in the year to year findings. A university can pop up places as well as drop them in an instant.

Even though each poll is assessing different factors, they aren’t the greatest tools of decision-making. As an university applicant, making your choice based on these rankings will hardly be useful, seeing that by the time you finish your university of choice might have jumped down (or up) ten to twenty places.

In the end, Edinburgh should not be downhearted because of these new statistics, considering next week they’ll probably be a brand new poll and a brand new ridiculous ranking nobody really understands. Perhaps, if we had gone up in level instead of down, I would have written a different article about how we as a university are  finally making it in the world and that because of this we are all going to end up rich and successful. But we haven’t. So I take this opportunity to vent out my frustration at a measurement system I believe is frankly a bit shit.

But hey, at least we are miles ahead of our Scottish counterparts, with Glasgow being the closest contestant at… 117th and our dear Heriot-Watt lagging behind in the 300s. Maybe these rankings are realistic after all.