They also look at proxy measures like reputation or research output, which are also very indirect ways of estimating the standard of the product being delivered to the student.

Surely it would be better for rankings to compare the quality of each university's graduates or their success in the job market.

Courtesy of LinkedIn, the latter is now possible. In the US, the UK and Canada LinkedIn offers university rankings based on career outcomes.

Which lead to best jobs

Drawing on the huge amount of data it has collected about professionals' careers and their education background, LinkedIn tells you which universities lead to the best jobs in each major profession.

Their approach is to first identify the top companies for a particular profession, say accounting. Then they construct their university ranking for accountants by analysing their data to see where accountants listed on LinkedIn went to university and calculating what proportion from each university end up working at top companies.

It's a very simple system, perhaps overly simple, but it does provide an objective output measure of which universities are the best to go to if you are aiming at a particular job.

It's also a useful reality check on the current popular rankings like Shanghai Jiao Tong, which relies entirely on each university's output of top flight research, or Times Higher Education, which is based on inputs and proxy measures like reputation and research.


Such is the importance of rankings to universities' marketing efforts that many spend a lot of time and resources on ensuring they present their data to the rankings bodies in the best possible light and some even appear to make decisions about their future structure based on how it will affect their ranking.

The beauty of a job-based output ranking like the LinkedIn one is that it is largely immune to such massaging. It just gives universities a simple incentive to produce the best graduates they can.

This is not to say the LinkedIn measure is by any means perfect. It only measures what LinkedIn members do. It doesn't report salary data. And somebody has to arbitrarily decide who the leading employers are that are used in the ranking calculation.

At the moment LinkedIn will not say whether it has plans to introduce its university rankings to Australia. But given that it is offered in the US, UK and Canada it's reasonable to think it will come soon.

In the meantime, the federal government is working on a system called QILT – Quality Indicators for Teaching and Learning – which it is planned will allow people to compare the job success (including salaries) for graduates of particular courses at different universities.

Students and their parents need this data. It can't come soon enough.