Are university ranking and popularity related? An analysis of 500 universities in Google Trends and the QS ranking in 2012-2020

ABSTRACT

Universities face tough choices about how to allocate tight budgets. A frequent question is whether a significant investment in research that is crucial for the university’s position in rankings will make the university more popular and lead to higher revenues from tuition. This paper analyses how the ranking and popularity of universities are related by examining changes in the QS ranking scores and the Google Search Volume Indexes. The analysis conducted for 2012–2020 for the top 500 universities revealed a positive relationship between the two variables. This relationship is statistically robust in both the ordinary least squares (OLS) and quantile regressions. However, it does not hold when the changes in ranking are small, nor in the short run. Finally, and unexpectedly, the results presented favour more investment by universities in humanities rather than in engineering and technology.

KEYWORDS:

• Google Trends
• QS ranking
• university ranking
• university popularity
• quantile regression

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for many insightful comments on the earlier version of the paper and Robin Hazlehurst for his excellent language editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This research was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Education and Science in Poland.