MIT tops the table as India falls further behind

MIT tops the table as India falls further behind

    US research powerhouse Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has retained the number one spot in this year's QS World University Rankings, but there is still no Indian university in the global top 200.
    MIT has gradually improved its ranking position in recent years, having risen from 10th in 2007 to take the top spot for the first time in 2012. MIT's consistency across the range of indicators was enough to beat the competition, making the top 50 in all of the six indicators.
    MIT stays clear of thirdplaced University of Cambridge due to its superior research citation rates, and trumps second-placed Harvard University due to its better student-to-faculty ratio and more internationally diverse student and faculty body.
    The US has seven institutions in the top 11, with Princeton and Caltech tying in tenth position. Yale (8th) and University of Chicago (9th) have both slipped one place, having been displaced by this year's only new entrant into the top ten, Stanford University (7th).
    The UK retains four of the top ten spots, with University of Cambridge retaining its lead over University College London (4th), and Imperial College (5th) moving clear of University of Oxford (6th).
    The UK's oldest institution, Oxford slips one place in the overall table, but ranks first in the faculty area ranking for arts and humanities, and is also the number one university for employer reputation, following a poll of 27,000 graduate employers worldwide.
    Harvard takes the top spots for social sciences & management and life sciences & medicine, while MIT is top for engineering & technology, and University of Cambridge is number one for natural sciences.
    The institutional ranking continues to be extremely stable, with only one university dropping out of the top 50 and four leaving the top 100. The volatility of some international rankings has been a frequent source of criticism, but the average movement in the top 100 is less than 3.5 places, down from 4.6 last year.
    Nunzio Quacquarelli, the founder and managing director of QS, said: "The extra stability in this year's rankings will be good news for the countless students across the world who rely on them to narrow down their choices. As more and more people compete for places at the top universities, it is the responsibility of ranking organisations to ensure that what they produce is transparent and accurate. As the first global ranking to have been accredited by the International Ranking Expert Group, we are living up to that."
    American universities continue to dominate the top of the rankings, taking
more than half of the leading 20 places, but there is much greater diversity beyond that. They represent less than a third of the top 100 and exactly a quarter of the top 200. Thirteen of the 19 US universities in the top 50 have gone down this year, albeit only by a single place in many cases.
    After several years in the doldrums, Continental European universities are enjoying a resurgence. It is led by Switzerland, which now has two universities in the top 20, following a leap of 10 places by Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL). ETH Zurich is the highest-placed university outside the Englishspeaking world, having moved up to 12th.
    The Netherlands has two more universities than last year in the top 100, and all six have improved their positions this
year. Although Germany still has only Heidelberg in the top 50, eight of its 13 universities in the top 200 have gone up this year. France has two universities in the top 50 and 19 in the top 400 and, while Italy still has no institutions in the top 100, every one of its representatives in the top 400 has moved up this year, some by as much as 50 places. In Scandinavia, Norway now has University of Oslo in the top 100, the highest-placed of four new entrants to that group, while Denmark has the University of Copenhagen in the top 50, the sole new entrant there.
    Elsewhere, the trends are less clear-cut. Some Asian universities have continued their progress up the rankings - National University of Singapore (24th) has overtaken University of Hong Kong (27th) to become the continent's leading institution, for example - but none has reached the top 20 and there is little sign
of the wholesale advance predicted by many commentators.
    International enrolments at the top 400 universities in the QS World University Rankings grew by 80,000 this year to a total of 1.37 million. This represents an average of approximately 3,400 international students per institution, up from 3,225 in 2012 - an annual growth of 6.5%.
    The trend is even more evident among the elite top 100 institutions, where international enrolments grew by 9% to an average of approximately 5,100 per institution.
    No Indian institutions in the top 200
    With the depreciating value of the rupee making international study more expensive, it will come as unwelcome news to students that there are still no Indian institutions in the global top 200.
    The nation's top performer is still IIT Delhi, which this year drops 10 places to 222nd. IIT Kanpur Bombay (233) and IIT Kanpur (295) both also rank lower than last year.
    While India's top IIT's have a good reputation among academics and employers, they are held back by high student-tofaculty ratios, a lack of influential research, and low levels of international diversity.
    Yet, while no Indian institutions feature in the top 200 - representing just the top 1.5% of universities worldwide -11 of the nation's institutions feature in the total top 800 universities ranked this year at www.topuniversities.com. They include seven IITs, alongside University of Delhi, University of Mumbai, University of Calcutta and University of Pune. India remains the only one of the group of emerging BRICS nations without a global top-200 institution. China leads with seven, headed by Peking University (46th), while Russia, Brazil and South Africa each have a single representative: Lomonosov Moscow State University (120th), Universidade de São Paulo (127th) and University of Cape Town (145th).
    A new, targeted ranking of the BRICS nations, planned for later in 2013, will give a more in-depth profile of Indian institutions in comparison with those of the other emerging economic powers.