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The top five universities in the ranking were: University of Oxford, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and University of Cambridge.

There was some rearrangement among the top tier of universities compared to the 2023 ranking. U of T swapped spots with University of California, Los Angeles, which took 18th place, followed by National University of Singapore and Cornell University.

There has been a noticeable decline in the fortunes of US and UK universities this year, as well as a further slide for European universities. An analysis of six years of data by THE shows that the average rank of US universities has declined from 296 in the 2019 rankings to 348 in the latest edition; the UK’s average rank has also sank but to a lesser extent, from 451 to 477.

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Overall, U of T continues to be one of the world’s top-ranked public universities in the five most closely watched international rankings. Other Canadian schools in the top 200 included: University of British Columbia (41st), McGill University (49th), McMaster University (103rd), University of Alberta (109th), Université de Montréal (111th) University of Waterloo (158th) and University of Ottawa (177th).

Weaker research quality and reputation ratings, higher student-staff ratios and lower international student and co-authorship scores were the main factors in Australia’s decline this year.

Asia saw the largest rise of all continents in research quality, teaching score, and overall performance in the latest World University Rankings.

It’s China making the biggest impression rather than the West.

China is edging closer to the top 10 and now has two institutions in the top 15 for the first time. Tsinghua and Peking universities both overtake the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University to rank 12th and 14th respectively in this year’s 20th edition of the ranking.

Meanwhile, Japan’s University of Tokyo now outperforms the University of Edinburgh, King’s College London and the London School of Economics and Political Science, after rising 10 places to 29th.

The United Arab Emirates-based University of Sharjah leads the international outlook pillar with a top score of 98.8, while City University of Hong Kong follows closely with 98.7.

India Rises in Global Representation

India’s ascent in the 2024 rankings extends beyond the number of universities featured. India has now risen to become the fourth most well-represented nation, advancing from sixth place in the previous year’s rankings. This upward trajectory reflects the increasing recognition of Indian universities on the global stage.

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Methodology – How World University Rankings are Made?

Times Higher Education has unveiled its World University Rankings for 2024, encompassing 1,900 universities from across 100 countries and regions. The table has been constructed based on the newly introduced WUR 3.0 methodology, which meticulously assesses an institution’s performance in five key areas: teaching, research environment, research quality, industry engagement, and international outlook.

Times Higher Education also measures the international outlook of universities, the number of students compared to the university staff, and how universities are perceived globally.

It also takes into account the reputation of research done by universities and how often papers produced by universities were quoted around the world.

This year’s rankings have been drawn from more than 134 million citations sourced from 16.5 million research publications. Additionally, the rankings incorporate valuable insights from 68,400 scholars worldwide. In total, a staggering  411,789 data points were collected from over 2,670 institutions that actively participated in the data submission process. )

Australia Rankings 2024

Results from the 2024 edition suggest that the pandemic damaged the business model that had buttressed Australia’s seemingly irrepressible buoyancy in the rankings. Border closures undermined universities’ ability to harvest overseas tuition fees to compensate for shortfalls in research funding, while diluting the international mix of staff and students.

Covid-induced redundancies also exerted upward pressure on student-staff ratios that were already high by global standards. Tweaks to the ranking methodology and updates to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation data that inform the distribution and country weightings of the reputation survey that determines one-third of the ranking scores also denied Australian universities crucial points in the competition for the highest spots.

Australia’s top universities have slipped down the world’s most prestigious academic league table, with every institution in the top 200 recording a lower rank than 12 months ago.

The slide down the Times Higher Education rankings comes after an overhaul of the methodology used to score universities, but analysts say Australia’s poor performance is because of a research funding shortfall as well as student to staff ratios, which are among the worst in the world.

The University of Sydney dropped six places to rank 60th in the world; behind the University of Melbourne, which dropped three places to 37th on the list; and Monash University, which dropped 10 places to 54th.

Australian National University dropped five places to 67th spot; the University of NSW dropped 13 places to 84th; and the University of Technology, Sydney dropped 15 places to rank 148th.

Times Higher Education chief global affairs officer Phil Baty said Australian universities had been outpaced by research investment of other institutions while a drop-off in international students from 30 to 26 per cent meant revenue and consequentially research funding had taken a hit.

“We’ve seen the rise of mainland Chinese and east Asian universities … Australia does not have the same level of the same drive and level of commitment,” he said.

The University of Sydney is among the best 60 universities in the world – just –but it has slipped in the rankings.

“In addition, while the rankings show Australia has historically very high levels of research quality, current figures show a relative under-investment in research, which sends a clear red-light warning.”

The student-to-staff ratio in Australian universities is among the worst in the world, with the index finding they are in the bottom 15 per cent of the 1900 institutions assessed.

“Student ratios were already low, but it has become lower because of a spate of redundancies at universities over the past few years,” Baty said.

Many leading UK universities remain over-reliant on China, despite the risk to such ties from geopolitical tensions.

September 27, 2023. Patrick Jack

UK researchers rely on Chinese collaborators for nearly a quarter of all outputs in some key fields, Times Higher Education World University Rankings data shows.

Analysis of Elsevier bibliometrics shows that UK- and China-based academics co-authored 24,000 research papers in 2022, representing 10.9 per cent of the UK’s total publications. This was up from 7.1 per cent in 2018.

However, in certain key disciplines the reliance on China was much greater. In engineering, Chinese collaborations accounted for 23.5 per cent of all UK outputs in 2022, up from 16.5 per cent five years previously.

Across the physical sciences, such partnerships made up 17.6 per cent of UK output last year.

Citing Clarivate data, the King’s report identified a range of more narrow subject areas where Chinese collaboration is even more prominent: for example, 45.5 per cent of UK research papers on automation control systems published between 2017 and 2021 in 21,000 leading journals had a China-based co-author.

Telecommunications, electrical engineering, artificial intelligence and information systems all had Chinese collaboration rates of between 30 and 40 per cent.

UK research institutions would face significant damage if they disengaged from China, and that “no viable alternative partner exists to fill the gap”.

It said that ministers and intelligence agencies needed to produce “clearer guidance” for “universities to maintain scientific collaboration and intellectual exchange with China for as long as the geopolitical context permits and it remains in the national interest”.

As the world’s largest spender on research and development, China was a vital partner in scientific research.

With the US and China locked in an intensifying contest for technological leadership that is already drawing in the UK and many other countries, the chances that the global scientific endeavour will be disrupted by geopolitics have risen sharply over the last two years.

Assessing and mitigating the impact of such disruption is a critical responsibility of university leaders and policymakers as they contemplate a global knowledge economy that could begin to deglobalise at pace.

Nevertheless, the continued concentration of Chinese doctoral students in high-tariff institutions, as well as Chinese nationals working in research in these institutions with links to Chinese research institutions, suggests that high levels of UK-Chinese co-authorship are likely to continue.

This highlights the need for institutions to look at how to diversify their research partnerships in particular areas, and for sector-wide institutions to adopt a strategic and long-term approach, including undertaking further analysis of where de-risking is necessary and supporting actions that can be taken.

Sources:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/world-university-rankings-2024-australian-elite-falters

https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/10/15/oxford-university-tops-the-times-world-university-2024-rankings-where-else-in-europe-featu

https://utsc.utoronto.ca/news-events/university-news/u-t-ranked-first-canada-21st-globally-times-higher-education-world-university

https://currentaffairs.adda247.com/times-higher-education-the-releases-world-university-rankings-2024/

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/top-australian-universities-slide-down-world-rankings-20230926-p5e7po.html

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/study/times-higher-education-unveils-world-university-rankings-2024/articleshow/103996028.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/study/times-higher-education-unveils-world-university-rankings-2024/articleshow/103996028.cms?from=mdr