New Rankings of World Universities by The Times

Higher Education of Chinese Mainland Needs Improving

October 6, 2011, the British "The Times Higher Education Supplement" (Times Higher Education) , together with the world's largest overseas studying service organization IDP Education Group, released the first 2011-2012 World University Rankings, which has become the golden standard for the public to compare the universities in the world.

This ranking of global universities measures in main the strength of scientific research of the universities. In all there are 15 countries from five continents with more than 17,500 academics accessing the survey, and more than 50 education authorities participate in the validation of the ranking. Besides, Thomas Reuters provide relevant datas for the rankings. The institutions concerned need to provide an independent evaluation of 13 indicators of data to the Vetting Committee of the University for them to assess comprehensively all the activities including teaching, research and knowledge transfer. This independent evaluation of 13 indicators can be divided into five categories:

Teaching - learning environment, teacher-student ratio, awarded Bachelor \ Doctorate, etc. (amount to 30% of the total weight score)

Research - the number of researches, income and prestige (amount to 30% of the total weight score)

Citations - the influence of scientific research (amount to 30% of the total weight score)

Industry Income - innovation, that is, the research income from industry and academic staff (amount to 2.5% of the total weight score)

International Outlook - the number of international students and teaching staff, and cross-border academic research (amount to 7.5% of the total weight score)

The ranking of the top 200 world universities, the ranking in alphabetical order of the 201-400 places, and the top 50 universities of six subjects are all based on adequate research and consultation; each indicators and their respective share of weight have been carefully set and evaluated, from which the comprehensive and objective ranking is finally reached.

Variable changes of the ranking of the top 200 universities

In 2010, the United States occupy seven seats in the top 10 universities around the world, with Harvard University, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Princeton University ranking the top five, and the University of California at Berkeley and Yale, respectively, came in the first 8 and 10. In 2011, American universities still maintain its strong competitive position, with seven seats unchanged. But it is indeed out of expectation that the 375-year-old Harvard is surpassed by the young professional institutions The California Institute of Technology. Nevertheless, each scores of this institution stay quite stable, and its research funding has increased by 16%. For the first time, this young California Institute of Technology has, superceding Harvard, jumped to first place. Its industry income is 61.1 higher in score, which shows that it performed better than Harvard in transforming science into productivity and innovation. Harvard, together with Stanford, ranked second. The last year No.12, University of Chicago, has jumped to the ninth position, while Yale University failes to enter the top 10 .

The British University continues to occupy three seats in top 10, but Oxford has surpassed Cambridge to be No.4 , while the Imperial College has jumped to nine. Only four institutions entered the top 20, which shows an increasingly wide gap between the UK’s leading universities and others. As for the Australian universities, they still remain competitive; seven out of the eight elite universities have entered top 200, with most of them ranking higher than before.  Among the top 200, universities of the United States and UK accounte for more than half of them, with respectively 75 and 32 in number. The rest includes 12 universities from German, 12 from Netherlands, 9 from Canada, 7 from Australia, 7 from Switzerland , 5 from Sweden and 5 from Japan.

Chinese universities need improving

In 2010, six universities in mainland China were on the list, while in 2011, only three universities left in the Top 200: Peking University ranked No. 49, Tsinghua 71, and China University of Technology 192. Hong Kong of China has four universities in the list, with Hong Kong University ranked 34, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 62, Hong Kong Chinese University 151, and City University of Hong Kong 193. Taiwan has only one left on the list, that is, Taiwan University, which shows a general decline in the performance compared with 2010.

In the top 402 universities in the world released by The Times, 10 mainland universities manage to be on the list, with Wuhan University ranking 397, its first time to rank higher than 400. Other names in 201-400 are Fudan University, Nanjing University, Zhongshan University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University, Harbin Institute of Technology. It can be seen that the universities selected differ slightly from those selected by our annual evaluation,, which is an indication of the various ideals and standards in terms of evaluation.

According to Qiu Junping, the director of Research Center of China Science Evaluation and professor from the School of Information Management School of Wuhan University, the first time for this university to rank higher than 400 reflects the progress of the development of the university The ranking will help the universities to realize their position in the world, to learn the major gaps in all the index, and then work on to find the focus of the future reform and development. He believes that Wuhan University should be keen on improving the core competitiveness in terms of quality, efficiency and international development.

Higher education is crucial for the successful development of the national economy. At the level of universities, the oldest university may not always wearing a garland, while the new ones are in the robust development. The traditional concept of hierarchy is increasingly challenged, and the global competitiveness of the talents is becoming more and more fierce. University rankings, to some extent, can help us understand the changing situation. In this ranking, the position of Chinese universities is clearly show; although Peking University and Tsinghua University remain among the top 100, there is still a great gap between the world top-drawer education and our other universities of 211 or 985 program.

Lou Wen,Reporter from http://www.ssjzs.com/