Indian institutions struggle for recognition in overall rankings, however.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Guwahati has been ranked as one of the top 100 universities in the world under 50 years old, according to a new report by Britain-based Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters.
The report’s “100 Under 50” section ranked IIT-Guwahati #87, sandwiched in between France’s Université Paris Dauphine at #86 and Australia’s University of Western Sydney at #88. At the top of the “100 Under 50” list is the Pohang University of Science and Technology (Postech), in the Republic of Korea, with an overall score of 69.8 out of 100.
IIT Guwahati is the only Indian school on the list, and the only institution from any of the major South Asian nations; Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan are all totally absent.
The Times Higher Education report gives IIT Guwahati an overall score of 31.7, with individual scores of 29.4 for teaching, 17.5 for international outlook, 17.0 for research, and 53.6 for citations. A fifth category, industry income, says “no data supplied.” Each score is out of 100, and were given a specific weightage when averaged together for the overall score.
Teaching (“the learning environment”) accounted for 30% of the overall score, research “volume, income, and reputation” was also worth 30%, as was citations. Industry income was only worth 2.5%, and international outlook accounted for 7.5% of the total score.
Established in 1994, IIT Guwahati was the sixth school founded in the IIT system. It is located in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, where it has a student population of roughly 4,500 undergraduate and post-graduate scholars, and a faculty of over 250.
Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters also released overall scores for the best educational institutions in the world, but out of 400 universities listed, only five originate in India, and none are in the top 225.
Panjab University ranked the highest of Indian institutions, landing in the 226-250 range. The other four Indian schools that received rankings – IIT Delhi, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, and IIT Roorkee – were all in the 351-400 range, the lowest of the entire list. IIT Guwahati did not place on this ranking system.
Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters ranked the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was ranked the highest in the total World University Rankings, scoring a 94.9 out of 100 and edging out the University of Oxford by just 0.1.
Harvard ranked #3, followed by Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The rest of the top 10 was filled out by Princeton, the University of Cambridge, UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Imperial College London.