There is good news for the Indian education system as the number of Indian universities in world’s top 1000 has increased to 24 from 20.
On Wednesday, the QS World University Rankings 2019 got released and the elite institutions of India – Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay (IIT-B), Indian Institute of Science (IISc) – Bangalore and Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi (IIT-D) got featured in the top 200.
The topmost institute of India is now IIT-Bombay that has attained the 162nd position, 17 positions up from 2018 while last year’s top institute IIT-Delhi remained at 172 this year also. In fact, IISc has also surpassed IIT-Delhi and secured the 170th rank.
Global higher education analysts QS Quacquarelli Symonds released the 15th edition of QS World University Rankings which are seen as one of the most respected and esteemed rankings. The good part for India is that six out of eight top ranked IITs/IISCs are constantly going up in the rankings while two have managed to remain on the same position for few years now.
Here’s the list of Top 20:
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2. Stanford University
3. Harvard University
4. California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
5. University of Oxford
6. University of Cambridge
7. ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
8. Imperial College London
9. University of Chicago
10. UCL (University College London)
11. National University of Singapore (NUS)
12. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU)
13. Princeton University
14. Cornell University
15. Yale University
16. Columbia University
17. Tsinghua University
18. The University of Edinburgh
19. University of Pennsylvania
20. University of Michigan
The top 1000 universities have been ranked by QS from over 85 countries and the top university of the world is Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the seventh consecutive time now.
Ben Sowter, QS Research Director, said this about the performance of Indian universities,
“The positive performance recorded by India’s most prominent institutions is symptomatic of a successful year for the country’s higher education system. 24 universities feature from India. 7 improve their rank, 9 remain stable, 5 are newly-ranked — and only three see their position drop.”
He further added,
“Indian improvements can be primarily attributed to improvements in QS’s reputational indicators, which account for the insights of 83,000 academics and 42,000 employers. Seventeen of India’s 24 ranked universities improve their rank for Academic Reputation, while 13 improve their rank for Employer Reputation.”
R Subrahmanyam, secretary, higher education, HRD ministry, expressed his opinion on the rankings,
“This is an affirmation of faith in the premier Indian higher educational institutions and an endorsement of the effectiveness of the measures being taken by Indian Government to improve ranking of Indian institutions.”
Many steps are being taken by the HRD ministry in order to improve the rankings of Indian universities by providing them with more funds and also the Institutes of Eminence scheme was launched so that these universities do not have to deal much with the regulatory framework.
However, Ben Sowter feels that a lot is still needed to be done as he said,
“Most of India’s other universities are struggling to improve their research impact, relative to global competitors: 12 see their rank for Citations per Faculty drop, while only 7 improve. India’s universities are also struggling to internationalize in an increasingly competitive international education market. 16 of 24 see their International Student Ratio rank drop year-on-year.”
Good work by HRD and Indian Universities and we hope to see more improvement in future!