UNSW Ranking Of Universities: a Result Looking for a Rationale

The UNSW Aggregate Ranking Of Top Universities combines the Times Higher Education (THE), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) to create the ARTU. This is claimed to provide a long term comparison of top universities. But it is not clear if this combination has any theoretical unpinning, or practical purpose, except to boost UNSW's rating. 

Such ranking systems are used by students in selecting an institution to study at. However, these rankings are heavily weighted to research performance, while most students are undertaking coursework. Also these ranking systems only include a few hundred universities, while there are thousands of other good educational institutions excluded. A reliable ranking of institutions would be useful for students, but ARTU is not that.

My favorite university ranking scheme is Webometrics, which relies on readily available information. As a result, about 30,000 institutions listed, including many vocational colleges, which are excluded other ranking systems. 

Here are institutions I have studied at most recently. All these institutions provided a useful quality education, but only the first (ANU), is in the ARTU list: 

National Ranking	World Rank	University	Presence Rank*	Impact Rank*	Openness Rank*	Excellence Rank*
6	75	Australian National University	159	77	70	140
29	764	University of Southern Queensland	1721	864	777	976
49	8269	Canberra Institute of Technology	13734	5420	5819	6626

Canada

 

National Ranking	World Rank	University	Presence Rank*	Impact Rank*	Openness Rank*	Excellence Rank*
44	1424	Athabasca University	2454	959	1884	2428