India falls off the league table of top universities
Hasan Suroor
LONDON: For the first time, no Indian university figures in Britain’s most authoritative league table of the world’s top 200 universities while China is in with six universities revealing a wide gap in higher educational standards between the two competing Asian giants.
Other Asian countries with world-class universities are Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea.
The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), which figured regularly in all the previous rankings, since The Times Higher – Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings which began three years ago, have fallen off the map this year partly because of a change in evaluation norms.
For this year’s survey, individual IITs were assessed, and not the “IIT system as a whole.” And none of the seven IITs was considered good enough to find a place among the top-ranking world universities.
Consolation
By way of consolation, however, IIT Delhi and IIT Mumbai find mention among the world’s top 50 technology institutions, with the former at 37 and latter at 33 — both way behind China’s Tsinghua University, placed at 16.
The six Chinese universities included among the world’s Top 200 are Peking University, Tsinghua University (also listed among the 50 best technology institutions), Fudan University, Nanjing University, the University of Science and Technology of China and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
The survey, which covers 28 countries, confirms the English-speaking world’s dominance in higher education with America and Britain leading the pack. Harvard University tops the league table followed by Cambridge and Oxford at second and third positions respectively. The top 10 universities are all either in U.S. or Britain.
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