Until last year, no Chinese universities featured in the QS’ top 15 global rankings. (Photo: Peking University)Amid a growing buzz over top Chinese universities opting out of the global rankings race, the latest round of the QS analysis has lauded China’s emphasis on research, which has helped two of its higher education institutes find a place among the world’s top 15.
According to the QS World University Rankings 2023, China has the third largest share of ranked universities (71), behind the UK (90) and USA (201). Until last year, no Chinese universities featured in the QS’ top 15 global rankings.
Peking University, which was ranked 18th in the 2022 rankings released last year, has jumped six places to 12, while Tsinghua University has risen from 17th to 14th position globally. “Both universities owe their impressive ascendancy to improved performance in QS’ research impact indicator (Citations per Faculty or CpF) and Faculty/Student Ratio (FSR) indicator, a proxy for teaching capability,” states the QS report.
The QS accords 20 per cent weightage each to these parameters in drawing up the rankings, while also taking into account academic reputation (40 per cent), employer reputation (10 per cent), international faculty ratio (5 per cent) and international students ratio (5 per cent).
Best of Express Premium
| University | World rank | Overall score |
| Peking University | 12 | 91.3 |
| Tsinghua University | 14 | 90.1 |
| Fudan University | 34 | 81.5 |
| Zhejiang University | 42 | 79.3 |
| Shanghai Jiao Tong University | 46 | 77.4 |
| University of Science and Technology of China | 94 | 60.7 |
| Nanjing University | 133 | 53.9 |
| Wuhan university | 194 | 44.3 |
| Tongji University | 212 | 42.4 |
| Harbin Institute of Technology | 217 | 42 |
The Chinese media had reported last month that many top universities of the Asian nation are planning to opt out of the global ranking frameworks led by analytics firms such as the QS or the Times Higher Education (THE) as part of the Xi Jinping administration’s rejection of foreign standards.
And it’s not just the top two. In China’s case, the QS has pointed out that the main factor behind the overall rise of China is the performance of the universities in terms of research impact.
As many as 37 Chinese universities have improved their performance over last year in terms of CpF. “Remarkably, eighteen Chinese universities are among the world’s top 100 for research impact. Only the United States has a larger share (22),” the QS report states.
Significantly, the QS, in response to a query from The Indian Express, has also underlined how Indian universities lag behind in this metric, affecting the country’s general performance. China, on the other hand, has gained a distinct upper hand on this front.
Ben Sowter, QS Senior Vice President, said, “No higher education system has improved as impressively as China’s has over the last decade. Until 2018, there was not a single Chinese university in the top 20.”
So much so that most Chinese universities have managed to counterbalance their drops in other parameters such as academic reputation, employer reputation on the back of high research scores. For instance, 47 of 71 Chinese universities have registered a lower year-on-year performance for academic reputation and 43 in employer reputation.
- The Indian Express website has been rated GREEN for its credibility and trustworthiness by Newsguard, a global service that rates news sources for their journalistic standards.
