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The Times Higher Education Rankings: KU and NUST make it to top 600 global unis

KARACHI, Dec 05, 2007: The fourth edition of The Times Higher Education World University Rankings Supplement from the UK has included three public sector universities of Pakistan among the top 600 universities of the world, two of which are in Karachi, PPI reported Tuesday.

The National University of Science and Technology (NUST) has been ranked No. 470, University of Karachi has been ranked No. 560 and Islamabad's Quaid-e-Azam University has been ranked No. 564.

Martin Ince of the Times Higher Education Supplement wrote in the editorial that the very top institutions may all be in the English-speaking world, but the top 200 are spread across 28 nations.

This confirms the message of earlier editions: the top universities, on a number of measures, are in the English-speaking world. Although heavily dependent on state funding, they are independent of governments. And, in many cases, they are far from being ivory towers. Instead, they are active in generating new technology and ideas across a wide range of subject areas and are closely integrated into the economies and societies of which they form part.

Their success at generating new knowledge and producing highly employable graduates - in the US especially - has made them rich from alumni donations, research grants and spin-off companies. Harvard University, which this year is top for the fourth time, is the world's richest by some distance, outspending the research budgets of many countries.

These rankings show the US and the UK to be home to the top universities on a wide range of measures, reflecting their success as well as the esteem in which they are held worldwide by academics and employers. Canada, Australia, Japan and Hong Kong are the only other countries to appear in the top 20, while the top Continental European institution, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, is in 26th place.

But the rankings also contain a more subversive message. The top 200 universities are in 28 countries. Four are in the developing world: in Brazil (with two entrants), Mexico and South Africa, where the University of Cape Town finally enters the top 200 after three years of near misses. Many small but affluent countries, for example Switzerland and the Scandinavian nations, have at least one entry. The story is less favourable in Mediterranean Europe. Italy and Spain muster only three universities between them in this analysis.

The top few are excellent on all the criteria we use, including those that reflect research excellence, teaching quality, graduate employability and attractiveness to students.

In the past, they allotted a top score for each measure to the highest ranked university on that criterion, and expressed all the other scores for that measure as a percentage of the figure for the highest placed institution. This meant that one exceptional university could depress the scores for 199 others. This change has had a particularly chastening effect on the London School of Economics, which has fallen from 17th place in 2006 to 59th this year.

Harvard was the only university whose placement did not change between our 2005 and 2006 rankings. The larger database of citations that they used this year for the first time has the effect of giving an advantage to some East Asian universities, for example Seoul National in South Korea, up to 51 from 63 last year, and Tokyo Institute of Technology, up to 90 from 118.

There are no Malaysian universities in this top 200. The two Singaporean universities we list, the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, have each taken a fall this year.

While the UK has 32 universities in the top 200, starting with Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London in second equal and fifth positions, Germany has only 11, starting with Heidelberg University in 60th position. This result will give more impetus to the German Government's decision to put more research money into universities.

In a head-to-head contest between Europe and North America, Europe's 86 listed universities easily defeat 57 in the US or even 71 for the whole of the Americas.

But a more interesting comparison may be with the Asia-Pacific region. This area musters only 41 entries in this year's rankings. Australia's important role in the English-speaking world and the energetic marketing of its universities across the Pacific give it 12 spots, with 11 for Japan, the world's second-biggest economy.

Many Asian universities have higher scores in 2007 than previously. Their governments may regard this as more important than the number of appearances for their own country. The Asia-Pacific region now has five of the world's top 30 universities, two fewer than the UK but four more than France.

The US state universities, funded mainly by state taxes and comparatively modest student fees, are not well-represented in this ranking or in national tables of US universities. With the anomalous exception of the University of California, most have fallen behind private institutions in both teaching and research. They do a competent job within the US, but have little visibility around the world.

The US and UK domination of these rankings suggests that national academic success has a number of common ingredients. The English language is a helpful start. But equally vital is the ability to connect to an economy that rewards new knowledge, for example via patents. Across the rich world, too, universities have benefited from the growing expectation that all young people with appropriate talent will go to college. This has allowed them to grow even when, as in the UK, they are not free to charge home students fees on the scale that major US universities take for granted.

The inability of Russian institutions to figure in this year's rankings may have much to do with Moscow's inability to put adequate funds into its higher education system. The Indian Institutes of Technology have also fallen out of the rankings this year for the first time, partly because we are now seeking opinion on each individual IIT, not on the IIT system as a whole. However, Indian institutions including the IITs, along with Russian universities, are present in our analysis of the world's top institutions in academic areas such as technology. Daily Times
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