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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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