Application of TOPSIS for world ranking of institutions/universities

Purpose The QS World ranking framework is a globally renowned ranking framework that ranks institutions globally as well as on a regional basis. This research aims to examine an alternative methodology for obtaining world rankings. This ranking is very popular, yet the research presents a case to have a re-look on the methodology used in the ranking. Design/methodology/approach The QS Ranking framework uses a simple additive weighting (SAW) approach to get a total weighted score for each candidate institution, and these are ranked according to descending order of total weighted score. An illustrative example of QS world ranking 2025 of four institutions is taken, and the results are compared with ranks obtained using the SAW methodology implicitly employed by the QS ranking framework. In our research, a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method, TOPSIS, is employed to rank and compare institutions with the QS ranking. Findings In the QS World University Ranking 2025, RWTH scores 59.9 with a rank of 99. The University of Copenhagen, Denmark, scores 59.6 with a rank of 100; IIT Bombay scores 56.6 and IIT Delhi 52.1. These ranks are interchanged with subtractive differences in the TOPSIS Score of 0.6350 for Copenhagen University and 0.4617 for RWTH and remain unchanged for IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi. Research limitations/implications This paper adopted a small dataset of four universities/institutions to test the alternative methodology that appears intuitively appealing to derive meaningful inferences. However, this paper does not comment on the basic structure of the QS ranking system, giving large weight to academic and employer reputations based on a survey-based approach. Originality/value This paper suggested an alternative but well-known MCDM technique (TOPSIS) for ranking world universities rather than the SAW technique implicitly employed by QS.