For some time, a number of countries have expressed dissatisfaction with the global rankings, especially those based in the UK. Russia has abandoned its Five Top 100 project which aimed at getting universities into the world’s top 100. A number of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology have boycotted the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. It is also noticeable that Chinese institutions have largely been absent from the THE Impact rankings.
Recently China has reduced the demands on its researchers to publish in international journals, a move that some analysts have suggested would cause the country’s universities to start falling in the rankings.
An article by Yojana Sharma in University World News reports that some leading Chinese universities will no longer participate in “international university rankings.” The universities concerned are Renmin University of China, Nanjing University, and Lanzhou university. Nanjing University had already announced that rising in international rankings was not a significant development goal.
So far, however, there is no sign that most prestigious universities in China, such as Peking, Tsinghua, Fudan and Zhejiang, will avoid the rankings published by QS and THE. In fact, Fudan recently entered the THE Impact Rankings and achieved first place in the Clean and Affordable Energy category.
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