The QS--i.e., "the Quirky Silliness"--rankings are back...

...for 2018.  QS is a shady operation, as I've discussed at CHE (or see this earlier discussion), and the rankings incorporate a lot of noise/nonsense that is irrelevant for those choosing PhD programs (e.g., "employer reputation," which just reinforces the halo effect of their method of surveying academic reputation).  The real difficulty is that they do not disclose the georaphic distribution of the philosophy evaluators or even their identities, but the former surely explains all the oddities.  Pittsburgh's strong showing, together with the implausibly strong showing of several German departments that do not really compete with the very top North American and U.K. programs suggests that a disproportionately large number of respondents are German academics (Pittsburgh has a very high profile in Germany).  They also don't disclose the faculty lists on which they based, e.g., the citation studies; I strongly suspect they are not doing a very good job discriminating between active and retired faculty, or philosophy versus non-philosophy faculty.