A series of world-famous schools boycott university rankings

The reason is said to be that the ranking method is outdated, goes against the mission of the profession and the school, and maintains a "distorted view" of education.

In response to the move, US News overhauled its ranking methodology after consulting with schools for criticism, including reducing and increasing the weight of some criteria in its law school rankings and adding new criteria in its medical school rankings. But the changes were not well received by schools, and the boycott continues to this day.

Harvard University is one of the schools that announced a boycott of US News' university rankings.

In July 2023, 52 Korean universities jointly established the University Ranking Forum of Korea (URFK) to protest against the new ranking method of QS, declaring a boycott until appropriate adjustments are made. This move came after most universities, including leading names such as Seoul National University, Korea University... fell in the rankings and only one university rose in the 2024 university rankings.

In response, QS said it had re-checked the data and recalculated the criteria, stressing that no errors had occurred as URFK alleged.

In China, three prestigious universities, Renmin University, Nanjing University, and Lanzhou University, also announced their withdrawal from all world university rankings from 2022 to focus on "educational autonomy" and "education with Chinese characteristics," according to Chinese media.

In the face of the controversy surrounding university rankings, Dr. Vu Thi Phuong Anh, a lecturer at the Faculty of International Languages ​​and Cultures at Hong Bang International University, once said that many researchers in the field of university education have long considered the use of university rankings to be a double-edged sword. On the positive side, rankings create conditions for schools to be transparent, providing necessary information to learners in the most concise form. But the downside of rankings is that they simplify the characteristics of schools into a group of measurement criteria designed by those who build the rankings, "sometimes quite subjectively". Then, the ranking unit gives different high and low results, as if these are the only criteria that schools need to strive for to become a good university, Ms. Phuong Anh commented.

Ms. Dao Nhat Mai, General Director of NEEC Study Abroad Consulting Company, said that world university rankings should only be used as a reference, "not as a requirement to follow" when choosing a school or major. "In general, rankings are only valid for a certain period of time and do not reflect the long-term quality of a training institution. Not to mention that in the academic world, there are tricks to increase rankings," Ms. Mai shared.

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