If the PISA rankings exposed the poor quality of education in India?s schools, the ?QS World University Rankings? for 2012 released today showed that our universities and even ?institutes of excellence? do not fare any better when compared to their international counterparts.
Not a single Indian university or institute has made it to the top 200 of the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) rankings ? the most reputed global rankings of institutes for higher education.
In 2010, IIT-Bombay was ranked 187, but dropped to 225 last year. This year it is down to 227.
?India remains the only BRICS nation without a university in the top 200. Two of the leading three institutions, IIT- Delhi (212) and IIT-Kanpur (278), have improved on their 2011 positions. Yet the comparison with other BRICS nations remains unflattering,? writes Danny Byrne, editor of topuniversities.com ? the QS rankings website.
Among the top 10 institutes are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in first place, followed by the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, University College London (UCL), University of Oxford, Imperial College London, Yale University, University of Chicago, Princeton University and California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in that order.
From Asia, those in the top 50 include University of Hong Kong (23), National University of Singapore (25), University of Tokyo (30), Kyoto University (35), Seoul National University (37), Chinese University of Hong Kong (40), China?s Peking University (44), Singapore?s Nanyang Technological University (47), China?s Tsinghua University (48) and Japan?s Osaka University (50).
China has seven institutes in the top 200 list.
Even in the Asia rankings, which is topped by the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, India has just 11 institutes in the top 300 while China, Singapore and South Korea continue to surge ahead. Nine Chinese institutes have moved up the ranks with Peking University ranking better than the University of Tokyo.
?We see India once again under-performing, with only 11 universities in the rankings, the vast majority of which are various Indian Institutes of Technology. Internationalisation has been identified as a key issue,? says a QS analysis of the Asian rankings.
The discipline-wise rankings present a slightly better picture with the IITs ranking among the top 50 engineering institutes. Delhi University too finds a place in the top 50 universities offering English Literature and Linguistics among others.
