Does anyone really care anymore? Probably not but it's a little like People Magazine . . . hard not to take a little peek juuust to see what's going on. Well the US and the UK cover the top 20 spots with Toronto sneaking in at #18. In other words, nothing new. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities
Despite coming from US News, this looks more like a graduate school ranking. That addresses my long-held complaint about how people use the yearly undergraduate rankings (a bit of joke in my opinion) as if they were graduate school rankings as well. (That's just ridiculous.) One thing that I liked was how it was possible to break it down by broad subject areas. (Not in the humanities though.) Individual schools are often stronger in some subjects than others. I looked at several subjects where I have some slight familiarity with particular schools' reputations in those subjects, and indeed found that what I perceived as the better schools moved up and had a higher ranking in those subjects than their position in the overall rankings. So these rankings do seem to have that value: If you are looking for a "top" graduate program in something like microbiology, then this might point you towards the stronger programs worldwide or in your country. Of course, a prospective doctoral student should already have gotten a feeling for that while an undergraduate, and even a single subject will have lots of research problems and specialties that particular departments aren't going to be equally good at. So while it's good that US News breaks things down by subject, it's still probably too blunt an instrument. And it's interesting to see how particular schools place comparatively, to see which programs US News at least sees as a particular program's peers in the wider international context. I'm unfamiliar with most of them, so I'm not sure how much weight I'd put on it.
