Most people who comment on these are disgruntled students comparing with ARWU. These people are doing their university no favours.
Peer review is the gold standard for academic reputation, dare I explain this – because their opinion is more important. Arguably, what do Fields medals or Nobel prizes have anything to do with the quality of teaching or reputation of an institution, or at least 30% of it? Similarly, articles published in Science or Nature (20%) – showing natural science bias and English speaking bias.

None of these rankings are perfect and none are better than the others – because they are all flawed.

Obviously, I agree with your comments. See my critique on the THES ranking and on international rankings in general.

Another problem is where and how do they find the industry professionals to rank these universities? And what gives this select group of people the capacity over others to rank these insititutions? For instance, do professionals in the USA have enough knowledge to rank universities from say South America or Japan?

Anyone who have lived through the research world of academia would know that academics are so focused on their own research that most don’t even have the capacity to comment on the research of other academics in the same discipline e.g. business (accounting vs. econometrics) or psychology (social vs. biological) so what gives them the capacity to rank other universities at the entire holistic level?

The bottom line is that you cannot rank universities at a world level because each university has it’s own specialist strengths and weaknesses. It does nothing but misinforms the uninformed (and those unwilling to be informed***) and misguides public/social policy.

*** by this I mean those wikipedia university page moderators who continually reference the THES despite substantial evidence regarding it’s credibility.

Rubbish! Look at where Stanford and Berkeley are.

Seems to me more like an ailing economy resorting to unscrupulous ranking to woo international students!