QS World University Rankings 2015/16

Based on web traffic* social media metrics**and estimated online consumers (>100m in 2015); the QS World University Rankings is by far the most popular annual league table of world universities.

The twelfth edition confirms Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the world’s top university followed by Harvard (2nd), Cambridge and Stanford (3rd=) while ETH Zurich (9th) breaks into the top 10.

Singapore’s leading universities gain substantially, each making the top 15 for the first time. National University of Singapore (12th) is the leading Asian institution and Nanyang Technological University (13th) is right behind them, taking a quantum leap.
Australian National University (19th) also returns to the top 20.
China’s Tsinghua University (25th) is Asia’s third best university, leading a strong Chinese cohort.

76,798 academics and 44,226 employers contributed to the rankings through the QS global surveys, the largest of their kind and QS analyzed 11.1 million research papers – indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database.  3,539 institutions were considered for inclusion and 891 ranked.

A modified approach to “citations per faculty”, a measure of research impact, has delivered fairer evaluations for universities with a strong profile in areas with lower research activity, such as arts, humanities and social sciences. LSE (35th) and other leading institutions traditionally overshadowed by research-intensive universities, see their excellence more equitably recognized.

Ben Sowter, QS head of research says: “These latest results reveal more diversity than ever in the distribution of world-class universities at the highest levels. We’re providing prospective students with the richest picture yet.”

The rankings include universities from 82 countries. Thirty-four countries feature in the Top 200. The United States dominate, with 49 institutions, ahead of the UK (30), Netherlands (12), Germany (11), Canada, Australia, and Japan (8), China (7), France, Sweden and Hong Kong (5).

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The QS World University Rankings for 2015/16 confirm that Taiwan has world-class universities despite the pressures on its higher education system.

The top-ranked Taiwanese institution by some distance is National Taiwan University, 70th in this ranking and up by six places this year. This ranking puts it some way behind the ancient, rich universities that dominate the top of the table, led for the second year in a row by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But it is highly creditable performance for a university in a small nation such as Taiwan. It puts NTU on a par with the University of Nottingham in the UK and with Shanghai Jiao Tong University in mainland China, itself the producer of a significant ranking of world universities. NTU does especially well in QS’s 77,000-person survey of world academics, in which they are asked to name the top universities in their subject. It is 37th in the world in this influential poll, which makes up 40 per cent of each university’s possible score in the rankings.

This year’s QS ranking has been improved in ways that allow it to compare the world’s universities more fairly. The main change has been in the way QS uses citations to measure research quality.

Since their launch in 2004, QS has always based 20 per cent of each university’s possible score in the rankings on citations, the number of times that its research papers have been referred to in the scholarly literature. This is an accepted measure of research effect. But it suffers from the fact that some subject areas, especially medicine, produce far more citations per person than others: the opposite is true of the social sciences and of the arts and humanities.

QS has solved this problem by equalising the influence of citations between the five major areas of academic life: the natural sciences; medicine and the life sciences; engineering and technology; the social sciences; and the arts and humanities. In addition, QS now corrects for the fact that social science and arts research may be less likely to be cited if it comes from countries such as Taiwan where some original work is not published in English.

This change has done NTU some good. It has now risen 17 places to 78th in the world for citations.

NTU is the highest-ranked of 15 Taiwanese universities in these rankings. Also in the top 200 are National Tsing Hua University, up 12 places to 155, and National Chiao Tung University, up 20 places to 182. National Cheng Kung University is up eight places to 224. Just below are two major movers. National Taiwan University of Science and Technology has risen 111 places to 260, but National Yang Ming University has lost 82 places to 338. These moves are partly due to the new QS approach to citations. NTUST has gained 203 places on this measure and is now 244 in the world for citations. National Yang Ming has lost 136 places here and is now 318 in the world.

Could do better?

However, it would be wrong to conclude that this improved methodology explains the whole of the change in this year’s QS rankings. A look at the detailed figures for Taiwan’s 15 ranked universities reveals some definite areas of possible improvement.

An obvious example is QS’s survey of 44,000 employers. It asks them where they like to go to get the best graduates. Every Taiwanese university has fallen in this poll, which accounts for 10 per cent of each university’s possible score in the ranking. Some of the falls are steep. Even NTU has lost 28 places to 133, while Fu Jen Catholic University fell by 110 places to 770.

It also continues to be true that Taiwanese universities have few international staff and students. They mostly rank below 400 in the world on both of these measures, which are worth five per cent each of an institution’s possible score. And the big class sizes familiar in Taiwanese higher education are reflected in poor scores for faculty/student ratio, which accounts for the final 20 per cent. At 33 in the world, National Yang Ming University is Taiwan’s leader here by some distance.

● QS has also measured academic achievement in each of the five “faculty-level” areas mentioned above. NTU is in the top 100 in every category. It is 32 in the natural sciences, 34 for engineering and technology, 47 for the arts and humanities, 53 for the social sciences and 60 for medicine and the life sciences. National Tsing Hua University is 78 in the world for engineering and technology.

The  complete rankings is available at www.TopUniversities.com