Asia continues its rise in the QS rankings

Anand Kulkarni  26 June 2021

The recent QS ranking continues to demonstrate that institutions around the world are engaging in greater numbers with rankings and meeting thresholds and that rankings are vehicles for attracting and retaining students and staff, for profile-raising and branding and for understanding relative competitiveness against other institutions globally.

The rise of Asia in the rankings continues to stand out, with 399 institutions ranked compared to 347 last year. China continues its inexorable march with 58 institutions ranked compared to 51 last year. Japan enhances its solid performance (up from 45 to 48), as does South Korea (up from 30 to 39) and Singapore continues to have three ranked institutions.

The rise of less developed Asian nations is instructive and suggests upward movement for the whole region as these countries continue to develop. For example, Indonesia has risen from 11 to 16 institutions ranked, Sri Lanka from two to eight, Bangladesh from two to four, Malaysia 21 to 22 and Pakistan from 10 to 11. Thailand, Vietnam and Macau hold the line with 10, four and two respectively.

Of course, one should not over-state the impact of Asia. The top 10 and top 50 continue to be dominated by the United States and Europe. However, the rise of China is reflected by the fact that it has two institutions in the top 20, five in the top 50 and six in the top 100. There are seven Chinese institutions in the top 200.

While there is a degree of concentration in the top 50, China has a fairly thin presence in the next 150 places, and having more institutions in the top 100 and 200 could be something to aspire to.

Nonetheless, China has a reasonable balance of institutions across the bands, indicating that it has a broad base of solid institutions, reflecting significant investments in human capital and infrastructure, the wooing of diasporic students and researchers and collaborative research programmes around the world.

However, when we compare China’s top five institutions with the top five institutions in the United Kingdom and the US, we note that there is a considerable way to go for China to close the gap across the criteria of international staff and students, academic and employer reputation and faculty to student ratio.

While there is a significant average gap in favour of the US when it comes to citations for the top five in China compared to the average for the top five in the US, the gap between China and the UK on citations for the top-ranked performers, while in favour of the UK, is much narrower.

 READ THE REST OF THIS ATICLE ABOUT INDIA AND COVID AT UNIVERSITY WORLD NEWS. 


Dr Anand Kulkarni is associate director of planning, performance and risk at Victoria University, Australia, and author of India and the Knowledge Economy. The views here are the author’s entirely.