How to Build a University Ranking Tracker with Web Scraping

Introduction University rankings from QS, Times Higher Education, and US News shift every year — influencing student decisions, institutional funding, and academic reputation. Building a ranking tracker lets you monitor changes, spot trends, and compare institutions systematically. In this guide, we'll create a Python scraper that tracks university rankings across multiple sources. Project Setup import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import pandas as pd import sqlite3 from datetime import datetime import time # Handle anti-bot protection on ranking sites # Get your API key at https://www.scraperapi.com?fp_ref=the52 SCRAPER_API_KEY = " your_key_here " BASE_URL = " http://api.scraperapi.com " Scraping QS World Rankings QS publishes rankings with detailed methodology scores: def scrape_qs_rankings ( year = 2026 ): """ Scrape QS World University Rankings. """ url = f " https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/ { year } " params = { " api_key " :