The 2023 QS Subject Ranking exercise has come and gone but not the ripples. There is a sense in which the comments below by Nous speaks very well to an aspect of the ripples even as the ranking illustrates the superiority of course/discipline as the definitive criterion by which a student can make the decision on where to go. By the list below, a student who went to Rutgers University rather than Harvard or Yale (if US) made a great choice in so far as it is Philosophy. Perhaps, more image breakers in the discipline are concentrated there now than at Harvard.
But Intervention’s greater consideration for publishing this is the prefatory comments by NOUS critiquing the exercise by QS. The caveats are very interesting.
The 2023 “QS World University Rankings” have been published. These contain rankings by subject matter, including philosophy.
The rankings are conducted by the London-based education firm Quacquarelli Symonds.
In the QS rankings, a school’s overall score for a particular subject is determined by a weighted formula that varies by area. In the arts and humanities, for the 2023 results, the formula used is: 60% academic reputation, 20% employer reputation, 7.5% citations per paper, 7.5% H-index, and 5% “International Research Metric“. (It is not clear why these factors are given these particular weights.)
QS does not specify whether its rankings are intended to assist prospective undergraduate or graduate students. The rankings have come under fire at various points for methodological concerns as well as conflicts of interest. Some of the results in philosophy will strike many readers as odd. So be aware that these rankings are controversial (as, of course, is the very idea of fine-grained rankings of places to study philosophy), and take note of alternative sources of information, such as departmetal websites, Academic Philosophy Data & Analysis and the Philosophical Gourmet Report (noting that various criticisms have also been made of the latter).
With those caveats in mind, here are the top 50 schools in the 2023 QS Rankings in Philosophy:
| Rank | University | Overall Score | Academic Reputation | Employer Reputation | Citations per Paper | H-index Citations |
| 1 | New York University (NYU) | 97.6 | 99.6 | 81.6 | 93.4 | 94.8 |
| 2 | Rutgers University–New Brunswick | 96.8 | 100 | 52.5 | 96.7 | 95.3 |
| 3 | The London School of Economics & Political Science | 94.3 | 96 | 98 | 88.5 | 85.4 |
| 4 | University of Oxford | 92 | 91.2 | 98.5 | 87.1 | 100 |
| 5 | University of Pittsburgh | 90.6 | 95.5 | 57.2 | 82.7 | 78.3 |
| 6 | University of Cambridge | 89.6 | 89.4 | 96.8 | 84.9 | 92.1 |
| 7 | Harvard University | 88.3 | 88.1 | 100 | 85.2 | 86.8 |
| 8 | Australian National University (ANU) | 88.1 | 88.2 | 88.6 | 87.9 | 86.8 |
| 9 | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München | 87.8 | 89.7 | 81.4 | 80.3 | 84.6 |
| 10 | University of St Andrews | 87.5 | 89.5 | 75.5 | 82.3 | 83.8 |
| 11 | University of Toronto | 86.4 | 87.1 | 84.4 | 81.2 | 87.6 |
| 12 | University of Notre Dame | 86.3 | 88.3 | 65 | 82.1 | 86.1 |
| 13 | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | 86.1 | 87.6 | 77.6 | 83.2 | 82.1 |
| 14 | Princeton University | 85.5 | 84.2 | 82.6 | 91.9 | 90.2 |
| 15 | Yale University | 84.2 | 82.9 | 90.3 | 88.8 | 86.1 |
| 16 | Stanford University | 83.1 | 82.2 | 94 | 86.7 | 81.2 |
| 17 | University of California, Berkeley (UCB) | 83 | 82.6 | 83.9 | 85.4 | 82.9 |
| 18 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | 82.5 | 78.5 | 93.4 | 100 | 89.6 |
| 19 | King’s College London | 82 | 81 | 83.2 | 84.5 | 86.8 |
| 20 | University of Bristol | 81.6 | 81 | 73.2 | 87.5 | 84.6 |
| 21 | The University of Edinburgh | 80.9 | 77.8 | 81.9 | 89.2 | 95.8 |
| 22 | University of Chicago | 80.2 | 80.6 | 83.2 | 80 | 76.1 |
| 23 | University College London | 79.9 | 77.8 | 82.5 | 86 | 88.3 |
| 24 | KU Leuven | 79.4 | 79.8 | 72.8 | 76.2 | 82.9 |
| 25 | Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne | 79.1 | 81.4 | 77.4 | 72 | 69.8 |
| 26 | Monash University | 77.9 | 74.4 | 86.8 | 92.6 | 84.6 |
| 27 | Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main | 77.8 | 80.4 | 48.2 | 78.6 | 72.5 |
| 28 | Macquarie University | 77.6 | 75.1 | 80.5 | 88.1 | 84.6 |
| 28 | The University of Sydney | 77.6 | 75 | 91.8 | 83.4 | 83.8 |
| 30 | Boston College | 76.8 | 79 | 64.3 | 73.8 | 69.8 |
| 31 | National University of Singapore (NUS) | 76.4 | 73.8 | 95.6 | 84.3 | 78.3 |
| 32 | Durham University | 75.8 | 74.4 | 71.2 | 83.8 | 80.2 |
| 33 | Université PSL | 75.7 | 75.3 | 68.3 | 78.4 | 79.3 |
| 34 | Central European University | 75.2 | 76.6 | 75.6 | 76.3 | 63.2 |
| 34 | University of Southern California | 75.2 | 71.5 | 73 | 92.1 | 86.8 |
| 36 | Sorbonne University | 74.8 | 76 | 78.9 | 68.6 | 69.8 |
| 37 | University of Amsterdam | 74.4 | 70.9 | 79.1 | 85.6 | 86.8 |
| 38 | Freie Universitaet Berlin | 74.3 | 75.6 | 69.1 | 74.4 | 66.7 |
| 39 | University of Leeds | 73.9 | 70.6 | 66.6 | 87.4 | 88.9 |
| 40 | University of Michigan-Ann Arbor | 73.8 | 70.4 | 75.2 | 89.9 | 82.9 |
| 41 | Lomonosov Moscow State University | 73.7 | 73.8 | 97.1 | 64.8 | 69.8 |
| 42 | Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) | 73.5 | 77.4 | 67.8 | 63.4 | 56.7 |
| 43 | Wuhan University | 73.4 | 77.3 | 64.5 | 65.3 | 56.7 |
| 44 | Peking University | 73.3 | 75.3 | 83.9 | 67.1 | 59.1 |
| 45 | University of Turin | 73 | 74.2 | 63.3 | 67.9 | 73.8 |
| 46 | Fudan University | 72.8 | 77.2 | 77.2 | 59.4 | 51.2 |
| 46 | Universitat de Barcelona | 72.8 | 72.1 | 64.7 | 76.9 | 78.3 |
| 48 | University of Geneva | 72.4 | 70.6 | 63.9 | 82.8 | 79.3 |
| 49 | University of Vienna | 72.2 | 69.8 | 72.6 | 80.2 | 82.1 |
| 50 | Sun Yat-sen University | 72.1 | 74.8 | 50.6 | 69.6 | 65 |
