Is Otago Uni telling porkies?

Robert Macculloch writes:

The latest 2024 edition of QS World University Rankings features 1,500 institutions across 104 locations, and ranks Otago in 206th place (https://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings) Yet Otago University explicitly claims that these QS rankings put it in “the top 1% of universities in the world”. They certainly do not. When will Otago withdraw its false advertising claim?

The top 1% of QS rankings would be in places 1 to 15.

I suspect what Otago is doing is comparing universities who get a QS ranking with all the so called universities in the world, to back their claim up. But it is misleading at best as they are including basically any institution anywhere that calls itself a university, or a tertiary institute.

There are almost 9,000 universities in Indonesia and India. So I’m guess Otago is boasting they are better than 99% of Indonesian universities that few have ever heard of.

A number of websites refer to there being 23,000 universities in the world, but when you look at details they list 55 universities in NZ, so they are obviously including technical institutes.

There are three main global ranking organisations. None of them rank more than 2,000 institutions.

So the Otago University claim is very dubious and misleading.