“Relatively small declines” in three heavily weighted metrics were enough to put Western out of the Top 200 in the Times Higher Education magazine’s World University Rankings, according to 2020 data released this week.
According to the U.K.-based magazine, Western moved from tied for No. 190 last year into the No. 201-250 range in the global rankings. Although Western’s overall score only moved from 54 to 53.2, THE rankings officials explained that “the Top 200 is sensitive to even seemingly small score variations.”
Despite an improvement in the International Outlook metric, relatively small declines in three heavily weighted metrics – Teaching (41.5 to 40), Research (36.1 to 35.7) and Citations (78 to 76.4) – had “quite a strong impact,” THE officials said. Western also saw a slight dip in the Industry Income metric (59.8 to 59.1).
Although specific positions are not offered outside the Top 200, Western is “more towards the top of the band” in the 201-250 band, THE officials continued.
In total, nearly 1,400 universities from 92 countries were included in the 2020 rankings.
Amongst Canadian universities, Western still ranked 8th out of 27 institutions.
The University of Toronto was the highest-ranking Canadian institution at No. 18. The University of British Columbia (No. 34), McGill University (No. 42) and McMaster University (No. 72) and the University of Montreal (No. 85) were the only other Canadian universities to crack the Top 100.
The remaining Canadian institutions in the Top 200 included, University of Alberta (tied for No. 136) and University of Ottawa (tied for No. 141). The University of Calgary and University of Waterloo joined Western at No. 201-250.
Despite some minor shuffling, the names in the Top 10 remained unchanged from previous years:
- University of Oxford (U.K.)
- California Institute of Technology (U.S.)
- University of Cambridge (U.K.)
- Stanford University (U.S.)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.)
- Princeton University (U.S.)
- Harvard University (U.S.)
- Yale University (U.S.)
- University of Chicago (U.S.)
- Imperial College London (U.K.)
Visit the THE Methodology page for full details on how the rankings are developed.