On September 12, the QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2018 is released. Now featuring 500 universities, this ranking gets to the heart of one of the most important questions for all students: will I get my dream job after university?

With tuition fees rising in many countries, it’s more important now than ever that going to university has a career benefit. Sure, three or four years spent partying and socializing has its appeals, but it’s no longer enough to justify the cost and effort of going to university, which is why the Graduate Employability ranking is so important.

Last year, Stanford University took the inaugural crown (a pilot version of the ranking was also released in 2016) with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Tsinghua University breathing down its neck in second and third respectively. Will it still be the best in the world this year? Here are some of the things to look out for in this year’s ranking.

Changes to the methodology

This year, a slight change to the weighting of the five different indicators used to assess universities has occurred. Alumni outcomes now carries a weighting of 25%, an increase from last year, ensuring more prominence is given to universities that have produced successful alumni. The dataset used to create this indicator has also been increased by 40%, ensuring it’s more thorough than last year.

To accommodate this increased focus on alumni outcomes, the weighting for employer-student connections has been reduced from 15 to 10%. This indicator counts the number of individual employers who have been actively present on a university’s campus over the last 12 months, at careers fairs and other events.

The other three indicators used for the ranking remain unchanged. They are: employer reputation, partnership with employers per faculty and graduate employment rate.

What does this change mean for this year’s ranking? Well, the shift will reward universities which have produced the world’s most creative, wealthy, entrepreneurial and philanthropic individuals, particularly if those people studied at undergraduate level as this is given a higher weighting than postgraduate study.

More universities than ever before

Last year’s ranking included 200 universities and was drawn from data that had been acquired and analyzed on 300 institutions. This year, the number of total universities considered has been doubled to 600, and the top 500 universities will be published.

As well as ensuring a much greater geographical spread of universities, the expanded ranking is likely to see several universities break into the top 50 and top 100 for the first time. Universities which performed well last year may have a fight on their hands to retain or improve upon their position.

Fight for number one

Which brings us to the battle at the top of the rankings table. Stanford University were last year’s champions and will be hoping to repeat the feat again this year. They should be helped by the fact that last year they scored full marks in two of the five ranking indicators, including alumni outcomes which is gaining in importance this year.

However, there are several universities well-placed to take Stanford’s crown. The University of Oxford also scored full marks for alumni outcomes in last year’s ranking, suggesting it could benefit from the change in methodology, while last year’s second place university MIT will be hoping it can build on finishing top of the QS World University Rankings again earlier this summer.

Of course, it shouldn’t be overlooked that another university could benefit from the expanded focus of this year’s ranking and shoot up the table to take the number one spot. All will be revealed on September 12.

By Josephine West

Whether you have a career plan in mind or not, knowing your degree will lead to a successful graduate job is vital, especially with the cost of attending university continuing to rise. Whether you picked a degree that was close to your heart or tactically decided to study a subject with strong career prospects and a big salary, the results of the QS Global Employer Survey 2016 are likely to be of interest to you.

The survey of employers around the world found computer science and information systems students to be the most valued, closely followed by business, accountancy and electronic engineering graduates. If you’re not sure what to study at university and need some help making your mind up, choosing one of the degrees below could prove to be useful.

At the other end of the table, classics graduates were deemed to be the least employable, closely followed by theology and philosophy students.

The top five disciplines employers recruit from are:

1. Computer Science and Information Systems
2. Business and Management Studies
3. Accountancy and Finance
4. Electrical and Electronic Engineering
5. Economics and Econometrics

The bottom five are:

1. Classics and Ancient History
2. Theology, Divinity and Religious Studies
3. Philosophy
4. History
5. Anthropology

However, don’t feel disheartened if you want to study one of these subjects at the foot of the table, as the survey’s results are dependent on the kind of employers responding to the survey, i.e. industry and world region. Employers from universities and research institutes, for example, didn’t respond to the survey, and they are traditionally a significant employer of arts, humanities and social sciences graduates.

Some of these subjects also produce graduates that are highly desired by only one or two sectors. For instance, 29.6% of consultancies surveyed said they would hire anthropology graduates above all other disciplines.

For instance, with the highest percentage, 29.63% of employers within the consultancy sector said they would hire Anthropology graduates above all other disciplines, demonstrating the desirability of these students. Moreover, employers from universities and research institutes did not respond to the survey, so this would account for the lower rankings among the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines.

So, while the results of the QS Global Employer Survey 2016 can help students make informed decisions, those looking to follow their heart shouldn’t be dissuaded from doing so. The right degree, within any discipline, develops opportunity, knowledge and potential.

Keep an eye out for our upcoming White Paper which will examine both the 2017 QS Global Employer and Applicant Surveys, drawing comparisons between student and employer expectations as we look at the conflict between what students hope their degrees will lead to versus and the reality of the current job market.

The QS Graduate Employability Rankings is an innovative exercise designed to provide the world’s students with a unique tool by which they can compare university performance in terms of graduate employability outcomes and prospects.

Each institution’s score is comprised of five carefully-chosen indicators. Employer Reputation excepted, all metrics used are, currently, unique to the QS Graduate Employability Rankings. These indicators and the main methodological enhancements introduced this year are described below:

Estimated Scores
Whenever QS has not been able to collect data directly from institutions or reliable sources, a conservative estimate is used for missing records. This calculation is based on the records available from institutions based in the relevant country or region

Stanford University has been named the best university in the world for graduate employability for the second consecutive year.

The American institution is one of five US universities in the top 10 of the QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2018, which assesses how successfully universities produce employable graduates and foster connections between students and employers.

Five indicators are used to assess universities in the graduate employability ranking: employer reputation, alumni outcomes, employer partnerships, employer-student connections and graduate employment rate. Of these, Stanford achieved a perfect score in three: employer reputation, alumni outcomes and partnerships with employers.

600 universities were considered for inclusion in this year’s ranking, twice as many as last year, with the top 495 published. See this year’s results in full here, or scroll down to see the top 10.

Want to learn more about the results in a specific region? Check out our guides to the US, UK, Europe and more below.

Best US universities for graduate employability

Best UK universities for graduate employability

Best European universities for graduate employability

Best Canadian universities for graduate employability

Best Australia universities for graduate employability

Watch the video above to discover the top 10 universities in the world in 2018 – based on the results of the QS World University Rankings® 2018. This year’s edition features over 950 of the world’s top universities in 84 countries, assessed on six performance indicators.

Video by Kai Song for TopUniversities.com

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Today, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018 was released, with the University of Oxford remaining in first place for a second consecutive year.

But how does this year’s THE ranking compare to the QS World University Rankings from earlier this year? Or to the Shanghai ranking, also published earlier this year, in which Harvard University was ranked the best in the world for the 15^th consecutive year?

Read on for a closer look at the top 10 from each of these major world university rankings, and the key similarities and differences between them.

Although there are some variations across each ranking, seven universities appear in the top 10 of all three. These universities are: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Harvard University, California Institute of Technology and University of Chicago in the US, and the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford in the UK. Interestingly, only one university from outside the UK and the US features at all.

Although MIT, Harvard and Oxford can each lay claim to being top of one world university rankings each, it’s actually Stanford which has the highest average position, ranking second twice and third once.

Three universities appear on two of the three major university rankings. Imperial College London is eighth in both the QS and THE ranking, but misses out on a top 10 spot in the Shanghai ranking. It’s a similar story for ETH Zurich, ranked 10^th by both QS and THE. The final university to appear twice is Princeton University, which is ranked sixth in the Shanghai ranking and seventh by THE.

The omission of both Imperial and ETH Zurich from the Shanghai ranking allows two American universities to feature in this top 10 but no others. University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University are the two outliers. The QS and THE rankings each have only one unique university in their top 10; UCL are ranked seventh in the world by QS, while the University of Pennsylvania squeeze into the THE top 10, sharing the position with ETH Zurich.

So why the differences?

Trying to make sense of the differences between each of these three major rankings can be tricky, especially if you’re trying to decide where to go to university. How much trust should you place in one ranking over another?

The differences between each ranking stem from the fact each one is judging universities against different criteria. For instance, the Shanghai ranking doesn’t consider an institution’s reputation among academics or employers, preferring instead to rank universities by considering the level of academic research they produce and the number of Nobel Prizes won by their staff. Although THE and QS both aim to take research quality into account, neither does so at the expense of considering a university’s reputation in some form.

Even when rankings are assessing the same things, their methods are likely to be different. 40% of a university’s total score in the QS World University Rankings is decided by academic reputation. To assess this, academics from around the world are surveyed and asked to evaluate the research produced by other universities. A similar metric in the THE World University Rankings – teaching reputation – is instead assessed by asking academics to assess the quality of teaching at universities, and is worth only 15% of a university’s total score. This difference is likely to lead to both rankings producing drastically different results.

Which ranking should I pay attention to?

It’s hard to answer this question without coming across as ridiculously biased, but here it goes.

If you’re looking for a university that has an enviable record of consistently producing high-quality research, try the Shanghai ranking.

If you’re looking for a university which is well-regarded by employers and other academics, and will set you up perfectly for a well-paid graduate job, the QS World University Ranking should be your first port of call.

And, if you want to see a ranking which attempts to reflect both a university’s research impact and its reputation, the Times Higher Education ranking is worth checking out, as it considers more variables than the other two. Of course, this might mean it provides less specific information that could be useful for you, but it’s good for a broad overview.

Lastly, it should be noted that both the THE and QS rankings make an effort to consider how international a university is (in QS’s case, this is done by measuring the proportion of international students and faculty members). If you’re looking to study abroad, both these rankings will potentially have more to offer you.

The University of Oxford has been crowned the best university in the world in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018.

It’s the second year the UK institution has been named number one, with close rivals the University of Cambridge rising two places this year to be ranked second.

The rest of the top 10 in the THE World University Rankings 2018 is dominated by American universities, with seven featuring in total. Of these, only two have improved upon their performance since last year, with the University of Chicago rising one place to ninth and the University of Pennsylvania squeezing into the top 10, up three places since last year.

The release of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings follows on the heels of the QS World University Rankings 2018 and the latest edition of the ‘Shanghai’ ranking which were published earlier this year. Collectively, these three world university rankings are seen as the most prestigious global comparison of universities.

Louise Richardson, Oxford’s vice-chancellor, told THE she was “delighted that Oxford has held its position at the top of these global rankings.”

Elsewhere in the world, the top university in Asia according to THE’s ranking is the National University of Singapore, ranked joint 22^nd in the world.

The top 10 in this year’s Times Higher Education World University Rankings can be found below.

Amid the devastation of Hurricane Harvey, heartwarming tales of heroic acts of kindness have emerged, as communities come together in the aftermath.

Among them, Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire has pledged free tuition and accommodation to 20 students displaced by the hurricane for a semester.

After floods ripped apart their Houston-area colleges, Franklin Pierce decided to offer the 20 students a way to continue their studies until spring, with board, fees and tuition all provided for free.

The offer is extended to any Houston-based student whose university was hit by the storm. If your college was flooded by Hurricane Harvey, you can apply online or by phone at 1-800-437-0048.

The university’s president Kim Mooney said: “We will offer them a temporary home and a safe environment in which to keep their educational pursuits on track until they can return to their own educational institutions for spring semester.”

The liberal arts college made a similar promise in 2005 to 14 students affected by Hurricane Katrina, when it hit New Orleans and displaced approximately 400,000 people.

Was your college hit by Hurricane Harvey? Email us to share your experiences at mathilde@qs.com.