China reaps reward of commitment to training researchers

There is a record level of Chinese representation across the top-50 spots in the QS World University Rankings by Subject, with 126 Chinese ranked among the world’s top 50 in their subject, up from 100 in 2020, and 97 in 2019.

Jack Moran, QS spokesperson, said the relentless rise of Chinese universities has been the most significant global trend in higher education since we began ranking institutions nearly two decades ago, with China now training more PhD students than the United States.

“In 2018, we saw one unsurprising consequence of this commitment to training the next generation of intellectual problem-solvers: the number of scientific, technical and medical research papers published by Chinese researchers exceeded those produced by American researchers for the first time ever.”

Two Singaporean departments have attained number-one spots: Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is the world’s best university for the study of materials science, while the National University of Singapore takes top spot for petroleum engineering.

According to Ben Sowter, senior vice president of professional services at QS, the consistent improvements made by Singaporean institutions in QS rankings are the result of a decade of investment and strategising.

“It was in 2010, after all, that the Singaporean government inaugurated the Singapore Universities Fund, with a view to avoiding the sort of downturn-driven real-terms funding cuts that have beleaguered universities across the world.”

“Now, a decade later, the National University of Singapore has the largest endowment of any university in Asia, while NTU’s is bigger than any of its Australian peers.

“Our rankings continue to demonstrate the relationship between funding, international outlook and research performance – and Singaporean successes are entirely coherent with those established correlations.”

The Malaysian higher education sector has recorded year-on-year increases in the number of Malaysian programmes achieving both top-100 and top-200 ranks.

Some 32 Malaysian programmes are placed among the top-100 universities for the study of their academic subject. This is two more than last year, with Universiti Malaya entering the top-100 for environmental sciences (89th) and pharmacy & pharmacology (97th). The number of top-200 Malaysian programmes has also risen from 90 to 95 year on year.

Twice as many South Korean programmes fall (117) as rise (59) in this year’s ranking.

Twenty-eight of the University of Hong Kong’s academic departments have been named among the world’s top 50 in their discipline. However, more than twice as many of Hong Kong’s programmes fall than rise in the ranking.

Hampered by stagnating research investment and increasing international competition, the Japanese higher education sector is struggling to keep pace with its continental and global peers. 28% of Japan’s featured programmes have fallen in rank this year, while only 14% have improved their position.

Sowter said: “QS attributes Japan’s ongoing ranking difficulties, in part, to the fact that Japanese spending on science and technology research has lagged behind a number of its global peers over the last decade.

“We observe, for example, that China nearly tripled its investment in the years between 2008 and 2018, while Japan’s remained mostly stagnant. Also, unlike China, which has steadily increased the number of research-ready PhD students receiving doctorates, Japan has not provided sufficient funding for its PhD candidates, which has seen the number of doctoral candidates in the country decline consistently since 2003.”

Sowter said the results of this are visible in Japan’s research output. Over the last two decades, global rankings of top-cited research papers have seen Japanese researchers slide from fourth in the world to 11th.

“While new policy initiatives like the University Fund are a step in the right direction, it is unlikely that their effects will become visible in our rankings until at least the second half of the decade. Singapore, which adopted a similar ringfenced endowment policy in 2010, saw its best results in our ranking exercises after 2015.”

Twelve Indian universities have achieved top-100 positions in their subject. In total, 25 Indian programmes within these universities achieve top-100 positions – one fewer than in 2020’s edition of the tables.

Moran said one of the biggest challenges faced by India is educational, providing high-quality tertiary education in the face of exploding demand.

“This much was recognised by last year’s National Education Policy or NEP, which set the ambitious target of a 50% gross enrolment ratio by 2035. It should therefore be small cause for concern that the number of Indian programmes featuring across our 51 subject rankings has actually decreased over the last year – from 235 to 233.

“While this is a minor decrease, it is indicative of the fact that ensuring expanding provision in a way that does not sacrifice quality remains a highly challenging task,” said QS.

However, QS noted that a number of programmes at India’s privately-run ‘Institutes of Eminence’ have made progress this year, demonstrating the positive role that well-regulated private provision can have in enhancing India’s higher education sector.”