Many students base their university selection on the rankings provided by various agencies. While rankings offer a good benchmark to compare universities, they should not be the only parameter to base your university selection on. The rank of a university may be used as an indicator to assess the overall standing of the university but not as an absolute deciding factor. While one can make a general assessment that a university ranked 10 would definitely be better than the one ranked at 40, it need not be better then a university ranked 14; not necessarily better for every applicant. Reason being the inherent problem with all rankings: ‘They do not measure what is important to you - the applicant’

When an agency ranks universities, they use their own set of parameters to determine the rankings. Each parameter is assigned certain importance and based on the overall score of the university, the rankings are determined. Now all factors that the agency considers while assigning the ranks, may not be important to you. Also their order of importance of the parameters may differ from your order of importance. Say for instance, ‘funds available within the department’ and ‘starting salaries of graduate students’ might be the most important factors for you, while they might be of least importance to the ranking agency.

Rankings tend to hide unique strengths and specialties. For instance the computer science department of a particular university might be exceptionally good for its research and courses in computer security, or an MBA program might be well reputed for its courses in Entrepreneurship, but overall program rankings do not convey such specialties.

Finally data collected to compile the rankings may not always be accurate. Schools report data that is available with them and it need not be complete. Some ranking agencies collect information directly from alumni of the programs and from current students. Some also collect data from recruiters at the program. Thus there are chances that the information thus collected may have been reported inaccurately (some times intentionally) or incompletely, thereby causing the rankings to reflect a skewed picture.

Thus as a student applying to a program or finalizing a university to join, it is recommended that you research the program’s strengths and weaknesses, courses offered, opportunities that the program would offer you during and after graduation, review admitted student’s profiles, and then finally look at the rank and reputation of the program.