Aren't college rankings just a scam?

Burin Kantabutra raises an interesting subject, but perhaps without realising its full ramifications. 

Other than a few night-school courses after the Navy, I never attended university, so please forgive any ignorance in what you will probably consider naive questions.

First of all, exactly who creates these university ratings that everyone is so concerned about? How do they make any sort of reasonable comparison between, say, Harvard, and other law schools across the globe? Is it because attending a more prestigious university leads to better job opportunities and salaries that everyone attempts to attend the highest-ranked schools?

Why do so many Thai students attend Western universities? I am really curious about that one, because I can’t understand why probing someone’s brain would be different in one country than in another. Ditto for engineering schools. Aren’t the rules for stress-limitation the same internationally? As for law, I can’t understand why anyone would want to study it abroad when they intend to practise in their home country. 

I know I probably sound sarcastic, but I truly am curious, because I suspect that education has become pretty much a scam that has students running all over the globe at great expense to their parents, in order to have a piece of paper that says that they were educated at a prestigious school. Education is a wonderful thing and opens many doors, but, regardless of where you are educated, if you lack creativity to begin with, you are pretty much limited to being run of the mill no matter what your major. It’s unfortunate that so many businesses and governments don’t realise that fact. Maybe that’s why we have so many failed corporations and incompetent governments. 

My daughter plans on majoring in journalism and wants to attend university in Chang Rai. Evidently those pesky ranking people decided it was a great school for journalism. And so it goes.

In any event, I would really appreciate it if Khun Burin, or anyone else for that matter, could enlighten me as to how these rankings come about.

John Arnone