Academic and Employer Surveys

QS invites institutions to supply both academic and employer contacts who will be sent the relevant reputational survey as part of our research process. The results of these surveys are an integral part of QS's approach to evaluating performance in the university sector.

We encourage universities to use our contact list submission process outlined below. This allows institutions a greater degree of control over the curation of their network.

Any contacts submitted by November 30 will be contacted for feedback from December.

Any contacts submitted by January 31 will be contacted from February.

If an institution misses the data collection deadline for submitting their lists, or sends out links to the sign-up facility too late, QS cannot guarantee that their contacts will receive the survey in time to be able to reply before the cut-off date for analysis. 

Survey responses received after the deadline will be counted in the following year’s analysis.

Number of Contacts

• Institutions may submit up to 400 contacts for each of our reputation surveys - Academic and Employer. 
• Institutions that participate in the business school rankings may submit an additional 400 contacts for each survey. These contacts will only feed into the analysis for the relevant business school rankings, and not back into our wider rankings suite.
• QS will use your contact list or contacts received via the sign-up facilities for two years – the year of submission and one additional year. Therefore, you do not need to resend us contacts sent during the previous research cycle. 

Selection of Contacts

• Do not submit "info@" or other generic email addresses.
• Do not submit job title information if you cannot verify it.

Academic Survey

• Contacts should have knowledge of academic excellence in a higher education institution (HEI).
• Contacts should be involved in teaching and/or research, including academics, research or library staff.

Employer Survey

• You can submit anyone involved with hiring decisions at a an organisation (private or public).
• You can submit multiple people at one organisation.
• Do not submit individuals from a higher education institution (HEI) or research institute).

We can accept contacts by the following methods:

• Contact Lists - CSV file format, uploaded to our QS HUB platform.
• Survey Sign-Up Facility - individuals who consent provide their details themselves.

For each survey you submit for (Academic or Employer) you can only choose one of the above methods.

You must signal to the research team whether you will use contact list submissions or sign-up facilities for each group of contacts.

Contact Lists

To send contacts via CSV file you must use the pre-defined CSV templates found below.

• CSV Template

When complete the file should be uploaded to the QS HUB platform.

If you do not have access to QS HUB please contact our Institution Support Team.

Consent

For Data Protection reasons you must seek consent from potential respondents before adding them to submission lists.

To seek consent you must send the email template below. This email template should be sent on its own and not accompany any other communication from the university. They should at no point feel coerced into participating or being influenced by your institution.

• Consent Email Templates 

Survey Sign-Up Facilty

Our Survey Sign-Up Facility allows individuals who consent to provide us with their own details.

The survey sign-up facilities for each survey can be found within the consent emails and below:

• Academic Sign-up Facility
• Employer Sign-up Facility

Guidelines

• You can contact any number of individuals to access the sign-up facility. However, the number of individual contacts from each list will be capped at 400.
• QS will send a notification once an institution exceeds 350 responses, at which point you should cease contacting further participants.

A university found to be in breach of QS’ guidelines by seeming to coach responses for the institution from contacts (for example by deviating from the prescribed templates without seeking guidance and permission from QS) or engaging in another unethical practice may be subject to sanctions.

These range from exclusion from the rankings for a cycle, the removal of that year’s nominations or other measures which QS deem reasonable.

We have had to implement the use of prescribed email communication templates to ensure compliance with data protection legislation and to ensure transparency and neutrality in how universities approach contacts for our reputational surveys.

Both the Academic and Employer Surveys are distributed worldwide to academics and employers from a variety of sources.

Academic Reputation Survey

The Academic Reputation Survey is distributed to sources including

• Previous Respondents
• Submitted contact lists from institutions
• Sign-ups on our sign-up facility
• IBIS database

Employer Reputation Survey

The Employer Reputation Survey is distributed to sources including:

• Previous Respondents
• Submitted contact lists from institutions
• Sign-ups on our sign-up facility
• Survey Partners

At the beginning of the survey, academics state their discipline area and their regional familiarity. The answers to this then guide the range of answers they can give in the remainder of the survey. We ask the following questions of each respondent:

Individual Characteristics

In this section we ask respondents for basic information about themselves and their organisation.

• Name
• Organisation
• Position/seniority
• Gender
• The number of years they have been in academia (Academic Reputation Survey)
• The size of their organisation (Employer Reputation Survey)

Knowledge Specification

In this section we ask respondents to highlight the locations (countries, territories, regions) they are most familiar with along with the faculty/subject/industry sector they are active in.

The results from this section determine which institutions they can nominate and also helps with the categorisation of their answers from a subject perspective

• Country/territory they are most familiar with.
• Region(s) they are most familiar with.
• Faculty area they are most familiar with (Academic Reputation Survey)
• Subject area (maximum of two)* that they specialize in. (Optional)
• Industry sector that they specialise in (Employer Reputation Survey)
• Business programmes they would recruit from - e.g. MBA, EMBA etc. (Employer Reputation Survey)

* Certain QS Subjects are not explicitly present in the survey form. This includes Geology, Geophysics and Petroleum Engineering. In such cases we derive their nominations and further transformations (see below) from the corresponding proxy field of study, which is available in the survey form: Geology and Geophysics are fully derived from Earth & Marine Sciences, while Petroleum Engineering is a weighted sum of Chemistry (5%), Environmental Sciences (5%), Earth & Marine Sciences (30%), Chemical Engineering (30%) and Electrical & Electronic Engineering (30%).

Top Institutions

In this section respondents are asked to nominate institutions that demonstrate academic excellence (Academic Reputation Survey) or that they would choose to recruit from (Employer Reputation Survey).

The institutions respondents can choose from is determined by the geographic familiarity. For Academics their own institution is not available for selection.

Respondents are asked to identify up to 10 business schools, either domestic or international, that they regard as producing the best research in their field(s) of expertise (Academic Reputation Survey) or that they prefer to recruit from (Employer Reputation Survey). Respondents can choose any business school regardless of their region of knowledge.

• Domestic Institutions (maximum 10)
• International Institutions (maximum 30)
• Business Schools (maximum 10)

Additional Questions

To answer certain higher education insight needs, or to receive feedback on our products, other additional questions may be asked. These questions necessarily vary from year to year, and are not shared in advance of our survey.

Once the survey has been collated, a variety of checks and balances are performed to ensure the responses are valid, useable and complete.

As part of our normal data procedures, we can and do clean the data we use in the results analysis, this includes:

• Research data (removals of self-citations, high levels of affiliations),
• Staff/student data (damping beyond certain thresholds, rejections of spurious data)
• Reputation data

We apply sophisticated and, importantly, non-manual processes to this cleaning. For reasons of data integrity and to prevent attempts to game the process, we do not publish a comprehensive list of our checks and validations, in line with good data governance protocols.