Of all the universities in the world, which are the best?

Ranking universities is a difficult, political, and controversial practice. There are hundreds of different national and international university ranking systems, many of which disagree with each other. This dataset contains three global university rankings from very different places.

University Ranking Data

The Times Higher Education World University Ranking is widely regarded as one of the most influential and widely observed university measures. Founded in the United Kingdom in 2010, it has been criticized for its commercialization and for undermining non-English-instructing institutions.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities, also known as the Shanghai Ranking, is an equally influential ranking. It was founded in China in 2003 and has been criticized for focusing on raw research power and for undermining humanities and quality of instruction.

The Center for World University Rankings, is a less well know listing that comes from Saudi Arabia, it was founded in 2012.

• How do these rankings compare to each other?

• Are the various criticisms levied against these rankings fair or not?

• How does your alma mater fare against the world?

Supplementary Data

To further extend your analyses, we've also included two sets of supplementary data.

The first of these is a set of data on educational attainment around the world. It comes from The World Data Bank and comprises information from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the Barro-Lee Dataset. How does national educational attainment relate to the quality of each nation's universities?

The second supplementary dataset contains information about public and private direct expenditure on education across nations. This data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics. It represents expenditure as a percentage of gross domestic product. Does spending more on education lead to better international university rankings?