Professor Robert MacCulloch: False advertising - Otago University

When will Otago University and its new Vice Chancellor, Grant Robertson, take down the False Advertising that says it is ranked in the "top 1% of World Universities".

The latest 2024 edition of QS World University Rankings features 1,500 institutions across 104 locations, and ranks Otago in 206th place (https://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings) Yet Otago University explicitly claims that these QS rankings put it in "the top 1% of universities in the world". They certainly do not. When will Otago withdraw its false advertising claim? The top 1% of universities according to QS are as follows:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Oxford
3. Cambridge
4. Harvard
5. Stanford
6. Imperial College London
7. ETH Zurich
8. National University of Singapore
9. University College London
10. Berkeley University, California
11. Chicago University
12. University of Pennsylvania
13. Cornell
14. University of Melbourne
15. Caltech
16. Yale
17. Peking University
18. Princeton

Otago claims to be ranked alongside the likes of Princeton, Yale, Chicago, Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, & Oxbridge. How is the Advertising Standards Board, Tertiary Education Commission & Education Minister letting it continue to get away with stating something that is patently untrue? Universities are meant to stand, more than anything else, for a pursuit of the truth. That is why they have the word "veritas" built into their name. How does ranking yourself in the top 1%, when you are not in the top 1%, fulfil that purpose? Worse still, the false claim appears to have been made to attract more students (i.e., money).

Sources:
https://www.otago.ac.nz/

Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.