No Indian institute in world’s top 200 universities

No Indian institute in world’s top 200 universities

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.