The data is taken directly from the THE website, specifying “New Zealand”:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2020/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/locations/NZ/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats
Object universities is a hyper2 support function and
universities_table a data frame.
These objects can be generated by running script
inst/universities.Rmd, which includes some further discussion and
technical documentation, and creates file universities.rda which
resides in the data/ directory.