Top Universities Guide

I have finally forced myself to buy and read the second edition of QS's book, retitled Top Universities Guide.

The first edition, which was called Guide to the World's Top Universities, was an unqualified disaster, full of errors the worst of which was getting every single student faculty ratio wrong as a result of somebody moving every university three rows down while copying data. Others included putting the Technical University of Munich in the profiles twice in positions 82 and 98 and listing an "Official University of California, Riverside". It also started to fall apart within a few days.

The new edition, however, tuned out to be a pleasant surprise. The previous errors seem to have been corrected and there do not appear to be any new ones. There is a new dignified purple cover and so far not a single page has fallen out.

This does not mean that the THE-QS rankings are faultless. Far from it. The peer review remains extremely biased, the international components are largely meaningless and the student faculty ratio is misleading and easily manipulable. Still, the book does show that in a technical sense, QS has improved quite a bit recently.

The change in title should be noted. There may be another reason, but this would appear to be a clever attempt to distance QS and the authors from the first edition without admitting that there was anything wrong with it.

And I wonder why Blackwell is no longer distributing the book.