Times Higher Education (THE) have announced the latest edition of their Asian University Rankings. There are not many surprises in the overall tables but some scores for the Research Quality metric have aroused concern, especially in India.
The methodology uses the same indicators as THE’s world rankings, but they are weighted differently. The most important change is that the Industry metrics have a weighting of 10% rather than 2.5%. There are 17 indicators, grouped in five “pillars”: Research Quality, Research Environment, Teaching, Industry, and International Outlook.
As expected, Chinese universities have a prominent position at the top of these rankings with Tsinghua University in first place and Peking University in second. Singaporean, Hong Kong, South Korean, and Japanese universities have also done well. The performance of universities in Central and South Asia is much less impressive.
Looking at the five “pillars” of the rankings it is noticeable that Hong Kong universities have high scores for Research Quality, which claims to measure citations using four different methods. Chinese universities, however, do well for Teaching and Research Environment, while universities in the Gulf Region share the top ten places with Hong Kong and Macau for International Outlook. Universities in Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore lead for Industry.
The top five universities overall are:
- Tsinghua University, China
- Peking University, China
- National University of Singapore
- Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
- University of Tokyo, Japan.
The top university in each indicator group is:
- Research Quality; Chinese University of Hong Kong
- Industry; City University of Hong Kong
- International Outlook; Ajman University, UAE
- Research Environment; Tsinghua University
- Teaching; Tsinghua University.
Source:
Times Higher Education