What exactly is "Industry" on Times Higher Education?

2

I have offers for Arahcaology from a number of Universities, one of them is Exeter. Exeter is higher ranked overall than the others, especially in Research quality. However I notice it has an extremely low score of just over 30 for industry. What does industry mean, and how does it impact courses?

Reply 1

cksiu

Universities Forum Helper

15

Original post

by Liman1897

I have offers for Arahcaology from a number of Universities, one of them is Exeter. Exeter is higher ranked overall than the others, especially in Research quality. However I notice it has an extremely low score of just over 30 for industry. What does industry mean, and how does it impact courses?

Don't rely on rankings too much. Some of the ranking criteria are not so objective. "Industry" probably means feedback/rating by the practioner community. The ranking guys can't ask every practioner, so how many were approached for feedback? How the guys selected the ones to give feedback? Were the selected representative of the whole industry? Were every feedback given equal weighting, irrespective of their "reputation" in the industry?

So, choose the uni you like more by yourself, don't let rankings decide your future.

(edited 10 months ago)

Reply 2

ExeterStudentRep

Official Rep

13

Original post

by Liman1897

I have offers for Arahcaology from a number of Universities, one of them is Exeter. Exeter is higher ranked overall than the others, especially in Research quality. However I notice it has an extremely low score of just over 30 for industry. What does industry mean, and how does it impact courses?

Hi Liman 1897,

Congratulations on your offer to study with the University of Exeter!

You can find more detail on the methodology used by Times Higher Education guide here -
World University Rankings by Subject 2025: methodology explained. Specifically, for industry they describe it as "Industry: measures income from industry partnerships and patents".

I'm not sure how important this really is for deciding which university to go to. Maybe if you were studying something like computer science or engineering where there is more of a culture of spin-out companies and entrepreneurship associated with the subject, then it might be something to consider (e.g. think Silicon valley and all the tech start-ups associated with universities like Stanford). For a social sciences course like Archaeology, I can't see how this would really be relevant.

In fact, this is something the Times Higher Education Guide acknowledge themselves, with the two metrics that make up the "Industry" score (Industry Income and Patents) only making up 3% of the total ranking grade. This is why Exeter can still be ranked really highly on the other metrics, which do matter, and achieve a higher ranking overall.

In short, it probably doesn't matter, especially for the course you're interested in.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

Kingsley
University of Exeter Student Ambassador

What exactly is "Industry" on Times Higher Education?

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