PH’s ‘Big 4’ in world university ranking: 2 fall, 2 stay in place

MANILA, Philippines—Two of the Philippines’ “Big Four” universities suffered a slide in ranking on the annual list of the world’s top universities which covers 1,300 universities across the globe.

According to the 2022 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings released last Wednesday (June 9), the University of the Philippines (UP) was still leading among Philippine universities on the list. The premier state university, however, slid down from a ranking of 396 in 2020 to 399 in 2021.

QS World University Rankings 2022

The University of Santo Tomas (UST), which placed fourth among the big four, stumbled down to ranks 1,001 to 1,200 from 801 to 1,000 in 2020.

INFOGRAPHIC BY ED LUSTAN

Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) and De La Salle University (DLSU) have maintained their 2020 rankings—ADMU at 601 to 650 and DLSU at 801 to 1,000.

For the tenth consecutive year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States was again ranked as the best university in the world after earning perfect scores in five out of six indicators.

Rounding up the top 10 are—University of Oxford, Stanford University, University of Cambridge, Harvard University, California Institute of Technology, Imperial College of London, ETH Zürich-Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, University College London, and University of Chicago.

The US continued to dominate the rankings with five American universities on the top ten list. United Kingdom had four and Switzerland had one.

The QS World University Rankings ranks universities according to:

• Academic reputation (40 percent)
• Employer reputation (10 percent)
• Faculty-student ratio (20 percent)
• Citations per faculty (20 percent)
• International students (5 percent)
• International faculty (5 percent)

Hits and misses

Despite the slump in their overall rankings, the Philippines’ big four were among the top 500 universities worldwide in terms of “employer reputation”—UP placed was 226th, Ateneo was 239th, DLSU was 329th and UST was 446th.

According to the London-based firm, employer reputation rankings were based on more than 75,000 responses to the QS Employer Survey.

The survey, which the firm claimed was “the world’s largest of its kind,” asked employers to identify institutions from which they source “the most competent, innovative, effective graduates.”

In terms of the Philippine universities’ academic reputation, which had the most weight among the five metrics, UP was 246th, DLSU was 461st and ADMU was 472nd, all on the top 500 list for that category.

UST, on the other hand, was ranked 501st on the academic reputation list.

The survey, according to QS, “collates the expert opinions of over 130,000 individuals in the higher education space regarding teaching and research quality at the world’s universities.”

“In doing so, it has grown to become the world’s largest survey of academic opinion, and, in terms of size and scope, is an unparalleled means of measuring sentiment in the academic community,” it added.

Scores for the faculty-student ratio in the four universities were on the lower side. The big four were ranked between 300 to 601 with UP at 323, Ateneo at 435 and both DLSU and UST at 601.

This metric, according to QS, was identified by students as the most important. The teacher-student ratio was also considered the most effective metric for teaching quality.

“It assesses the extent to which institutions are able to provide students with meaningful access to lecturers and tutors, and recognizes that a high number of faculty members per student will reduce the teaching burden on each individual academic,” QS said.

The area in which all four universities ranked the lowest was on citations per faculty.

A table accompanying the survey report shows side-by-side comparisons of the scores of the top four universities in the world and the big four universities in the Philippines in terms of total citations for papers produced by institutions in a five-year period:

QS explained that all available citation data were sourced from Elsevier’s Scopus database, the world’s largest repository of academic journal data.

Top universities in Asean

Two universities from Singapore—National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU)—ranked 11th and 12th in the latest world rankings.

These were the highest ranking among the 61 universities in seven Southeast Asian countries on the QS list—Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam.

UP was 17th in Southeast Asia.

But in terms of number of universities on the world ranking list, Myanmar was on top among universities in Asean with 22 universities on the list.

Indonesia had 16, Thailand had 10, the Philippines and Vietnam had four each, Singapore had three and Brunei had two.

In 2020, QS released the 2021 QS Asia rankings which showed UP on the 69th spot and 13 other universities below 100.

Out of 650 universities in Asia, Singapore’s National University of Singapore was hailed as the top university.

UP takes 69th place in top 100 universities in Asia list

TSB