The World University Rankings

Relevance

• GS 2: Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.

Context

• Recently, The Times Higher Education (THE) released the World University Rankings 2022.

About the ranking

• The ranking includes 1,600 universities across 99 countries and territories.
• It is based on 13 indicators that measure four broad areas: Teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

Key points

• The University of Oxford, United Kingdom continues to be the top-ranked university in the world for the sixth consecutive year.
• The top 20 ranks were dominated by the United States universities.
• The top 200 ranks were dominated by 4 countries—United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Australia.
• Rise of Chinese university: A decade ago, there were 3 universities in the ranking while today the country has 10 universities in top 200.

Top 10 universities in the world

The World University Rankings 2021 India

• No Indian university is in the top 200, IISc Bengaluru continues to be the highest-ranked Indian institution in the top 350.
• A record 71 institutes have qualified for this year’s rankings

Boycott of THE ranking by the Indian universities

• IITs in Mumbai, Delhi, Kanpur, Guwahati, Madras, Roorkee and Kharagpur have not participated in the THE global rankings.
• The institutes announced their boycott in April 2020, citing concerns over transparency after none of them found a place among the world’s best 300 universities.

Reasons for the boycott

• IITs objected to the THE for allowing participating institutions to use collaborative research projects to increase their score on the citation metric.
  • Such research papers have high citation by virtue of multiple authors associated with it.
  • Hence, an institution that is part of such a project ends up having a disproportionate advantage over others because of one paper that is cited multiple times globally

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