My response is similar to Judge Judy's. Color me skeptical. (I'm skeptical about most things, if truth be told.) QS is an education marketing company that universities hire to recruit foreign students, particularly from Asia. http://www.qs.com/for-institutions/marketing-department-services/
With the normal caveat that these are all bogus anyway, what's wrong with Harvard not being ranked number one in every single ranking ever in perpetuity?
Stanford's #2, miles above Harvard. Harvard's merely the Stanford of the East. It's not like Cambridge Mass took too hard a hit from QS. MIT's their #1. (Two of the world's top three isn't terrible.) Admittedly, MIT is extraordinarily good at the things it does best. (Many universities can say that.) It's perhaps the best engineering school in the United States, and probably the world. (Not only at the doctoral/research level, but at the undergraduate level too.) It's a world leader in many of the physical and biological sciences. But the humanities? Not so much. If we are going to be giving entire universities general institutional rankings, I'd prefer a less specialized school be #1.
This list has value in indicating that each institution on it is a great university, among the best in the world. The ranking of schools inside the list - pretty much meaningless.
