Western shadowed many of its fellow Canadian universities in dropping down the 2018 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University rankings, released earlier this week.
Western found itself ranked No. 210 among top universities around the globe, tied with the University of Antwerp. The university dropped from No. 198 in the 2016-17 rankings and was bookended by Arizona State University (No. 209) and Vanderbilt University (No. 212) on the 2018 list.
Prior to this year, Western steadily ranked in the Top 200, including No. 191 in 2014-15, No. 199 in 2013-14, No. 173 in 2012-13 and No. 157 in 2011-12. Since 2014, the university has moved down 11 places. Over the five years considered, Western moved up once and fell three times, still performing in the Top 22 per cent of the QS World University Rankings.
Considering there are approximately 26,000 universities around the world, Western’s rankings indicate it is among the top 1 per cent of the world’s institutions.
The University of Toronto was the highest ranking Canadian institution at No. 31 and is followed by McGill University (No. 32) – which has been the country’s top ranked institution since 2014. Joining them in the Top 200 were the University of British Columbia (No. 51), University of Alberta (No. 90), Université de Montréal (No. 130), McMaster University (No. 140) and University of Waterloo at (No. 150). The University of British Columbia dropped out of the Top 50 for the first time since 2011.
This year’s results indicate Canadian higher education has not successfully followed up on its performance in February’s QS Best Student Cities Ranking, in which Montreal was ranked first in the world. Canada’s share of Top 200 universities dropped from nine to seven, after Western (No. 210) and the University of Calgary (No. 217) saw a slight drop in rankings.
“The recent QS Best Student Cities Ranking indicated the benefit that students receive when close interaction between industry, universities, and government is fostered. This year’s QS World University Rankings reiterate this point, with clear evidence that Canadian universities are becoming ever-more-fruitful hunting grounds for the world’s employers,” said Ben Sowter, Research Director at QS.
More than 180 universities from the United States and Canada were included in this year’s ranking, but none come close to matching the performance of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “MIT has a network of successful alumni who make substantial donations to their alma mater and the power these connections grant the university cannot be overestimated,” Sowter said. “Other institutions are scrambling to catch up, but MIT has a 20-year head start so will be pretty difficult to dislodge.”
MIT remained the world’s leading university for a record sixth consecutive year. It was followed by Stanford University, Harvard University, California Institute of Technology and University of Cambridge, collectively making up the Top 5.
Lower down the rankings, things were less certain for U.S. and Canadian universities as growing competition internationally is making it harder for some institutions to attract international faculty and students. Twenty-one of the Top 50 universities in the United States and Canada fell down the ranking since last year.
The QS World University Rankings are based on four categories: Research, Teaching, Employability and Internationalization. The methodology consists of six indicators: Academic Reputation (40 per cent), Employer Reputation (10 per cent), Faculty-Student Ratio (20 per cent), Citations Per Faculty (20 per cent), International Students (5 per cent) and International Faculty (5 per cent).
Western’s highest mark came for International Faculty, ranked No. 62 in the world. The university scored above the national average in the categories of International Faculty, Citations Per Faculty, Employer Reputation and Academic Reputation.
In total, 26 Canadian institutions were ranked. Seventeen saw their Employer Reputation scores improve, including Western. However, only three saw their Academic Reputation scores improve, while Western and 22 others saw their scores decrease. This metric measures an institution’s standing among the global academic community.
Eighteen Canadian institutions saw their scores for Citations per Faculty deteriorate. This metric measures a university’s research impact by dividing the total number of citations a university’s research receives by the total number of faculty members. Western remained flat.
Over recent years, Russian universities have benefited from increased government funding and a concerted attempt to improve student mobility and that investment looks to be paying off. Of the 24 universities from Russia included in this year’s ranking, only two fell compared to last year, while the others have either held firm or made impressive gains on their competition.
Elsewhere in Europe, UK universities struggled for a second straight year although Cambridge, Oxford, UCL and Imperial all retained places in the top 10. Whether Brexit and the fall-out from the 2017 general election will make it harder still for UK universities to make international connections remains to be seen, and likely political changes in France, Germany and other European nations could cause plenty of shifts in the world of higher education in the years ahead, Sowter said. For now, many western European countries appear to be in good health, with Italy in particular resurgent, thanks to two new entries in the Top 200.
With six universities in the Top 100 for the first time ever, this year’s ranking make for exciting reading if you’re from China. Zhejiang University and the University of Science and Technology in China were new arrivals in the Top 100. In total, China had nearly 50 universities in this year’s ranking.
Elsewhere in Asia, there’s big news in Singapore where Nanyang Technological Institute has overtaken the National University of Singapore and is on the cusp of the Top 10.
“The world is changing quickly and rankings will increasingly chart the triumph of younger, more agile universities over their more traditional counterparts, as has happened here,” Sowter said.