The list is is topped by Harvard University
Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings 2017, announced on June 14, counts none of the Indian Universities in its top 100 list.
The list, which is compiled through research insight from leading academics across the world, is topped by Harvard University.
Even this year, India remained a conspicuous absentee in the list drawn up on the basis of top academics’ perception of universities on the global platform.
According to Narayanan Ramaswamy, Partner & Leader for Education & Skilling Sector, KPMG in India, the absence of Indian institutes in reputation rankings is also due to slower adoption of proactive positioning compared to their international contemporaries,
“Most global universities take conscious efforts to position themselves regarding who they are, why students should consider them or who have they hired. This is something which Indian institutes have rarely done. Even for IITs. It happens more through their alumni network than anything that they have proactively done.
While such global rankings are recent phenomena, Indian institutes have been slower in adopting them as compared to their global counterparts. India has now started to do this and initiatives such as NIRF are welcoming steps in that direction,” Ramaswamy said to the Business Standard.
No institute, Indian or otherwise, had been left out deliberately. There was no single strategy guaranteeing success in the World Reputation Rankings said The Rankings Editor, Phil Baty.
“The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings are based on nothing more than subjective judgment – but it is the considered judgment of senior, published academics, the people best placed to know the most about the world’s universities,” he said, as Business Times reported.
Singapore, Japan, and China represented Asia in the top 30, dominated by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University retaining their second and third positions that they had owned the previous year.
Oxford and Cambridge came in a joint fourth.
However, the US universities took eight out of the top 10 places, with 42 institutions in the top 100 in the rankings.
The results are based on a survey carried out between January 2017 and March 2017, which received 10,566 responses from 137 countries.
University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, Yale University, University of Chicago and California Institute of Technology followed, making up the top-10 list.
However, this year, Asian universities improved their performance, with 28 of them on the list, with China continuing to rise and overtaking several prestigious European institutions.
Both Beijing-based research universities, Tsinghua, ranked 14 (up from 18 last year) and Peking, ranked 17 (up from 21 last year), making it “evident that universities in the Asia-Pacific were becoming increasingly prominent brands on the world stage,” said Phil Baty.
According to Baty Chinese universities were in a position to challenge institutions in North America and Europe. He noted the rise of Asian, particularly Chinese universities, are overtaking distinguished Western institutions, including the Imperial College London, the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University.
China’s achievements, Baty added, had a background of 22 years’ worth of ‘Excellence Initiatives’ – large injections of additional government funding aimed at accelerating universities’ performance. China’s latest project, dubbed World Class 2.0, announced in 2015, aimed to establish six of its universities in the leading group of global institutions by 2020, and for some of those to reach top 15 status by 2030.
“This government-led vision and drive is one key factor for Chinese universities’ success. If the country continued to pump billions of yuan into its institutions and focused on boosting the quantity and quality of its research output , there would be no doubt that its leading universities’ overall performances would catch up with their growing prestige,” Baty added.
The report states that the institutions that consistently perform well in the table are “truly global universities, with partnerships and collaborations that span the globe, and publish high-impact research in leading journals.” The rankings were the result of the considered judgment of senior, published academics, the people best placed to know the most about the world’s universities, said Baty.