It depends. For high school students who are passionate about research and have set teaching and academia as their professional goal, rankings such as Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) may be excellent resources while choosing schools. These institutions measure university performance based on prestige in research and criteria such as the number of Nobel prize winning faculty, published articles, cited researchers. To these students, ARWU, Times Higher Education and even QS World Rankings to a slightly smaller extent, publish rankings that are meaningful, and they should make use of them. ...