There was little reason for India to smile when the
prestigious QS World University Rankings were announced recently. No
Indian institute figured in the world’s top 200 universities of the list
of 700 that were ranked under the scheme.
For the
first time, America's prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology
grabbed the top slot from UK's Cambridge University in a list of world
university rankings for 2011-2012. However, four of the six top slots in
a global university “league table” by QS World University Rankings were
occupied by the UK universities.
With MIT leading
the list, Cambridge University slipped to the second spot and Harvard
still down to the third rank.
University College,
London (UCL), Oxford and Imperial took the fourth, fifth and sixth
places respectively. The seventh place was awarded to Yale University,
followed by University of Chicago, Princeton University and the tenth
position to California Institute of Technology.
The
QS World University Rankings is a ranking of the world’s top 700
universities by Quacquarelli Symonds using a method that has published
annually since 2004.
The QS rankings were originally
published in collaboration with Times Higher Education from 2004 to 2009
as the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. In 2010,
Times Higher Education and QS ended their collaboration. QS assumed sole
publication of the existing methodology, while Times Higher Education
created a new ranking methodology with Thomson Reuters, published as
Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
The
QS rankings rate the world's top 400 universities, evaluating each
institution's strengths in research, teaching, the employability of its
graduates and international outlook. While India is yet to secure a
place in the top 200, other Asian countries such as China, Japan,
Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan sit comfortably among the top 100 of the
rankings table, led by University of Hong Kong (22) and University of
Tokyo (25).
“If we are serious about staying on top,
the government must concentrate investment where it will have the most
impact — in our world-class research-intensive universities,” director
general of the Russell Group of research-based universities Dr. Wendy
Piatt said.
In 2010, the Indian Institute of Delhi
was ranked 202 in the list but it has fallen to 218th this time.
Similarly, IIT-Bombay (was 187, now 225); IIT-Madras (was 262, now 281);
IIT-Kanpur ( 249, 306);
IIT-Kharagpur (311, 341); IIT-Roorkee (428,
438) and IIT-Guwahati (501, 563).
The other universities have followed
suit – University of Delhi (was 371, now 398); University of Mumbai
(493, 578); University of Calcutta (506, 649) and University of Pune
(578, 661).
India has scored very badly on quality
research and fall in all the universities’ academic reputation. The
employer reputation of IIT-Bombay, IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Kharagpur,
IIT-Guwahati and universities of Mumbai, Calcutta and Pune has slid
backwards too. For the academic and employer ratings, inputs from as
many as 33,000 academics and 16,785 employers from more than 130
countries were taken by QS, the largest surveys of their kind ever
conducted.
