In Bangladesh, the admission test can be considered to be one of the most hectic journeys for a student. More than 1,20,000 students each year fight to secure a place among approximately 65,000 available public university seats. This fierce competition is there due to several factors, including the considerably inexpensive undergraduate education that those universities offer and the mass social perspective about public universities as “The Better Universities”. So, what happens to the students who fail to secure their place there? That is where private universities come in.
Private universities have garnered significant attention and popularity over the past decade. This is not because many students have “no other way than private universities”, but also due to some additional factors. The most noteworthy of those might be the ranking systems.
These ranking systems are published by various international organisations, with the education analytics firm Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and the British magazine Times Higher Education (THE) being the two most renowned. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), also known as the Shanghai Ranking, and the Best Global Universities (BGU) by US News and World Report are two other popular global university ranking systems. These systems have seemingly become popular in Bangladesh as well, and this popularity can be better understood from the following table regarding the organic traffic on their webpages, as per SE Ranking, in the last six months.
Now, private universities, which primarily depend on student enrolments for their revenues, have sought to attract more students. They have started utilising their ranking placements as arguably their biggest advertisement method to attract their “primary stakeholders”. Some private universities like North South University stunned the general social media scrollers by securing the top places amongst the Bangladeshi universities on these rankings. They occasionally even overtook some public universities that are regular entries on these ranking systems. Nevertheless, the question can arise in some people’s minds, “Does this ‘higher ranking’ necessarily assure a better future for myself (or my child)?” To get the answer, it is essential to know what the rankings mean and what points they focus on.
QS Ranking System: Their most reputed rankings include the likes of QS World University Rankings, QS World University Rankings by Subject, and QS World University Rankings by Region. These rankings rank a large number of universities globally based on different criteria. For example, the QS World University Ranking is based on Academic Reputation, Citations per Faculty, Employment Outcomes, Employer Reputation, Faculty Student Ratio, International Faculty Ratio, International Research Network, International Student Diversity, International Student Ratio, and Sustainability of a university, which then produces an Overall score. The 2026 edition of The QS World University Ranking is the latest one, ranking 1503 universities based on the aforementioned criteria.
THE Ranking System: THE ranking system has been admired due to its improved ranking methodology, making it one of the most popular and credible ones. Similar to QS, THE publishes its rankings yearly. But unlike QS, it generally ranks more than 2000 universities each time using institutional-level data across 31 subject areas. The latest edition of their most well-known ranking is the World University Rankings 2025, which has ranked 2,855 universities across 115 countries. In this ranking system, THE displays the overall and the faculty-wise rankings of a university. Then, each of the rankings displays what percentages were given to the Overall, Teaching, Research Environment, Research Quality, Industry, and International Outlook criteria for that university to secure the respective spot. Other than the World University Rankings, THE also has some other ranking systems, including University Impact Rankings, Interdisciplinary Rankings, and some regional rankings.
ARWU: Becoming the first Asian ranking system, ARWU ranks more than 2500 global universities annually but only publishes the best 1000. They also publish rankings based on regions, academic subjects and departments. Being located in China, they also have a separate ranking of Chinese universities. For their global ranking, they assign weighted marks to 6 primary indicators under the 4 following criteria: Quality of Education, Quality of Faculty, Research Output and Per Capita Performance. The grand total of the assigned marks is 100, and the ranking is prepared according to the marks received by the 1000 entries. The 2024 Academic Ranking of World Universities is their latest global list.
BGU: The US News and World Report published their first annual world ranking 28 October 2014 and continued to do so till today. Their ranking methodology consists of 13 indicators, with each having a different percentage-based weight attached to it. These indicators have two primary focuses: publications (books, research papers, and their citations) and international collaborations.
Organisations like QS and THE have become popular names in Bangladesh, and private universities are keen to advertise their places on these lists. But for a student or a parent, a flashy ranking is only one piece of the puzzle. It is easy to get caught up in the hype, but what do these rankings really mean for a student’s education and career prospects? So, what to focus on when evaluating a university should also be a matter of discussion.
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The writer teaches English and Communication courses at American International University-Bangladesh
