That is the view of Ben Wildavsky, author of the acclaimed book The Great Brain Race: How 51³Ô¹Ï Universities are Reshaping the World, which was published this year.

Speaking earlier this month at the Carnegie Council, a US international-affairs organisation, Mr Wildavsky said that many people felt global rankings "measure the wrong things, create perverse incentives" and "don't tell you about the real effectiveness of a university".

But Mr Wildavsky, senior Fellow in research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, argued that rankings can be a force for good.

While there were problems with them, he said, they could be "very useful" for individuals, universities and policymakers. He pointed out that 51³Ô¹Ï's World University Rankings "quickly became used by policymakers as a way of looking at how much universities are respected by their peers", and had encouraged "self-examination on the part of universities, which have not always been terribly receptive to outside examination".

51³Ô¹Ï

For Mr Wildavsky, the key question for those compiling rankings is "how to make them better".

"51³Ô¹Ï acknowledged that there were a lot of flaws in its sampling and survey," he said. "It's trying to start the whole thing over again and is being very transparent.

51³Ô¹Ï

"I'm on its Twitter feed and every couple of days it mentions a speech one of its head editors is giving about the need for more input about what it should do differently. I think that's great ... it is moving in the right direction."

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