Should You Choose a University by Its Ranking? A Get-Started Guide 03
If you are deciding where to spend the next three years, you have probably already opened a world ranking. It is the obvious place to start, and it is worth knowing what you are actually looking at before you let it decide anything.
What the rankings measure
The three big global rankings — QS, Times Higher Education and Shanghai — are built for a specific purpose: comparing research output across countries. That purpose shows in the weights.
- **QS gives 45% of the score to two opinion surveys, one of academics and one of employers, asking them to name the universities they respect. Another 20% is research citations per member of staff. 10%** is the staff-to-student ratio. The rest is international share and sustainability.
- Times Higher Education calls one pillar "Teaching" and gives it 29.5%, but more than half of that is another reputation survey; roughly 10% of the total score rewards three kinds of income — institutional, research and industry.
- Shanghai (ARWU) does not measure teaching at all. Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals, papers in Nature and Science, highly cited researchers.
Nowhere in any of them is there a measure of how well a class is taught, how accessible your professors are, or whether you will finish your degree. Research published in 2025 tested the QS model against Australian data and found the staff-to-student ratio correlates with the final score at r = 0.11 — effectively zero — while the two reputation surveys correlate with each other at 0.98. Nearly half the score is measuring fame twice.
Why Italian universities sit lower than you would expect
In the latest QS edition, Politecnico di Milano is 87th, Sapienza 111th, Bologna 123rd, Padua 204th, Politecnico di Torino 206th. Twenty-six of the forty-seven Italian universities assessed moved up, while most German, French and British ones moved down. No Italian university is in the world top fifty.
The reasons have very little to do with teaching quality:
- Italian public universities are large and open-access by design. More students per lecturer is a deliberate policy choice — university for everyone — but in the formula it reads as a penalty.
- Most degrees are taught in Italian, so the international-share indicators score low.
- Italy spends about 1% of GDP on higher education, against 2.1% in the UK and 2.3% in the US. Income is literally one of the indicators.
- Eurostat puts students from abroad at 5.3% of all tertiary students in Italy in 2024, one of the lowest shares in the EU. That is what a system teaching mostly in its own language to mostly its own citizens looks like — and it is a scored indicator in both QS and THE. On short exchange mobility, Italy is a different story: it is one of the most chosen destinations in Europe. The rankings do not count exchange students.
None of that tells you anything about the quality of the lectures you will sit in.
The same company ranks Italy completely differently
QS also publishes a Best Student Cities ranking. Instead of asking professors who they admire, it asks students where they want to be: safety, pollution, tuition costs, cost of living, ratings from students who studied there, how many stay after graduation.
In that ranking, Milan is 39th in the world, Rome 47th, Turin 66th out of 150 cities — and Milan is 20th globally for employer activity. Same company, same universities, same year. Only the question changed.
What to check instead
1. The department, not the university. A subject-level ranking tells you far more than an overall one. An excellent course can sit inside an average university, and the reverse is just as common.
2. What it costs to live there and to enrol. Tuition at Italian public universities is calculated on family income (the ISEE system) and is waived entirely below a threshold, which is why students routinely graduate here without debt. Then check rent in that specific city: it will vary far more than tuition.
3. Whether you can actually find a room. This is the one that decides whether your semester works. ESN Italia's analysis found that 16% of incoming international students in Italy fail to find accommodation, 28% arrive without a confirmed contract, 68% contacted more than ten housing providers before signing, and the Erasmus grant covers on average less than half of a monthly rent.
Getting started
Rankings are a reasonable tool for one question — where is world-leading research done in my field — and a poor tool for the question you are actually asking, which is where you will live well and learn well for three years. Read the subject table, ignore the overall number, and spend the time you save on the housing search instead. It is the part that will decide how the year goes.