Asian University Rankings

QS Quacquarelli Symonds has come out with a ranking of the top 200 Asian universities. Here is the top ten.

1. University of Hong Kong
2. Chinese University of Hong Kong
3. University of Tokyo
4. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
5. Kyoto University
6. Osaka University
7. Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
8. Seoul National University
9. Tokyo Institute of Technology
10. National University of Singapore and Peking University


There are also rankings by disciplinary cluster and by indicator.

For every single disciplinary cluster, the University of Tokyo, not the University of Hong Kong is top. How strange.

For the indicators, the National University of Singapore is first for Employer Review and International Students, Tokyo University for Academic Peer Review, College of Medicine at Pochon Cha University (Korea) for faculty student ratio [I’m wondering about that as well], Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology for papers per faculty, Yokohama City University for Citations per Paper, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for International Faculty, Kansai Gaidai for Inbound Exchange Students and City University of Hong Kong for Outbound Exchange Students.


These rankings seem to be a shrewd marketing move. Universities that have no chance of getting anywhere in the World University Rankings will now be able to boast that they came in the top 50 Asian universities for outbound exchange students or top 100 for citations per paper. A glance at the indicator rankings, for example, shows some Malaysian universities that one would not have thought had any chance of being in any sort of ranking. On the other hand, these rankings have been able to identify rising stars such as the Multi Media University.

There are two methodological innovations, both of which are questionable. They need to be discussed since this regional ranking could be a tryout for the global rankings. The first is the addition of two further measures of internationalization, inbound and outbound exchange students.

If internationalization is going to be a criterion, then having more measures might be a good idea. However, it is time to consider whether internationalization is actually a valid indicator of quality. Measures of internationalization do not correlate very well if at all with any other indicator and they also give an unfair advantage to the European Union and Hong Kong.

If we want to measure faculty quality, which internationalization supposedly underlies, a better method might be calculate the percentage of a random sample of teaching and research staff on university web pages who obtained degrees from the top 100 universities (on the Shanghai rankings?).

However, since QS get a lot of their bread and butter from facilitating students moving across national boundaries we are unlikely to see the end of this indicator.

The addition of number of inbound and outbound exchange students might also be very easily manipulated. If it were included in the world rankings it is likely that we will see universities setting up branch campuses a few miles away across some increasingly irrelevant frontier and then moving everybody there for their second year and calling them exchange students. So we might expect to see Queens University Belfast setting up a branch in Dundalk in the Irish Republic or the National University of Singapore in Johore in Malaysia and so on.

The other innovation is that research is measured by citations per paper, which measures the average impact of papers, and papers per faculty which measures the quantity of research in a very basic sense. This represents an improvement over the previous policy of using a single indicator. However, the problem remains that both are based on the Scopus database which aims to be as inclusive as possible. Scopus is an excellent research tool but inclusion in its database is an indicator of quality only in the broadest sense. To be credible, QS should consider finding some measure of research that measures genuine excellence.

These rankings have some surprises, the most noticeable and one lacking in face validity, is that the University of Hong Kong and not the University of Tokyo is the top university in Asia. Or perhaps this should not really be a surprise. Tokyo actually outperforms Hong Kong on all indicators except the internationalization ones and is ahead in all of the disciplinary rankings. Again, a lot of South Korean universities do very well.

It is good that QS are prepared to experiment with different indicators but the methodological innovations of these rankings do not seem to help very much.