[3] The ranking has been criticized for its overreliance on subjective indicators and reputation surveys, which tend to fluctuate over time and form a feedback loop.

Since then, the company expanded to include a wider range of higher education-focused products and services before partnering with THE in 2004 to create the THE–QS World University Rankings.

A perceived need for an international ranking of universities was highlighted in December 2003 in Richard Lambert's review of university-industry collaboration in Great Britain[13] for HM Treasury, the finance ministry of the United Kingdom.

THE created a new methodology with Thomson Reuters, and published the first Times Higher Education World University Rankings in September 2010.

QS publishes the rankings results in the world's media and has entered into partnerships with a number of outlets, including The Guardian in the United Kingdom and Chosun Ilbo in South Korea.

QS designed its rankings to assess performance according to what it believes to be key aspects of a university's mission: teaching, research, nurturing employability, and internationalisation.

Jessica Turner serves as the company's chief executive officer, responsible for the firm's operations and strategy.

QS has admitted that it is a limited metric, particularly in the face of modern enhancements in online teaching methods and content distribution.

QS has explained that it uses this approach, rather than the citations per paper preferred for in other rankings systems because it reduces the impact of biomedical science on the overall picture – biomedicine has a ferocious "publish or perish" culture.

[21] Since 2015, QS has made methodological enhancements designed to remove the advantage institutions specializing in the Natural Sciences or Medicine previously received.

[22] QS has conceded the presence of some data-collection errors regarding citations per faculty in previous years' rankings.

For less prominent institutions, Scopus has more non-English language and smaller-circulation journals in its database leading some critics to suggest that citation averages are skewed towards English-speaking universities.

The most recent edition surveyed some 99,000 employers at companies and organisations that hire graduates on a significant or global scale.

University standing here is of special interest to potential students, and acknowledging this was the impetus behind the inaugural QS Graduate Employability Rankings, published in November 2015.

Additional metrics include incoming and outgoing exchange students, academic staff with a PhD, and web visibility.

The methodology for this ranking has been developed to reflect specific challenges and priorities for institutions in the region, drawing on 10 indicators.

Launched in 2012, the rankings are based on a range of indicators that are designed to capture the experience of students living and studying in a particular city.

[31][32] In September 2012, The Independent described the QS World University Rankings as being "widely recognised throughout higher education as the most trusted international tables".

[9] Since the split from Times Higher Education in 2009, further concerns about the methodology QS uses for its rankings have been brought up by several experts.

In October 2010, criticism of the old system came from Fred L. Bookstein, Horst Seidler, Martin Fieder, and Georg Winckler in the journal Scientomentrics for the unreliability of QS's methods: Several individual indicators from the Times Higher Education Survey (THES) data base—the overall score, the reported staff-to-student ratio, and the peer ratings—demonstrate unacceptably high fluctuation from year to year.

The inappropriateness of the summary tabulations for assessing the majority of the "top 200" universities would be apparent purely for reason of this obvious statistical instability regardless of other grounds of criticism.

"[44] In June 2012, Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne and a member of the THE editorial board, said, "I will not discuss the QS ranking because the methodology is not sufficiently robust to provide data valid as social science".

[47][48] In 2021, research published by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley raised the possibility that institutions that employ QS's consulting services are rewarded with improved rankings.

QS denied the possibility and stated that it had firm policies and practices to minimize potential conflicts of interest.

[50] The Independent Expert Group (IEG) convened by UNU-IIGH in November 2023 proved how universities that buy products and services from QS have better chances of moving up in those rankings.

[51][52] Dzulkifli's statement sparked a lot of discussions within the academic sector in Malaysia, with some supporting his notion while others criticising it as being irrelevant itself.

Separated into "tours", QS's event offerings typically comprise a series of university and business school fairs.

The event aims to provide a more holistic overview of an MBA degree, with enhanced focus on pre- and post-study processes and insights.

The QS World Grad School Tour focuses on international postgraduate programs, particularly specialised master's degrees and PhDs in FAME (Finance, Accounting, Management and Economics) and STEM disciplines.

QS also offers universities an auditing service that provides in-depth information about institutional strengths and weaknesses.