A website known as the Times Higher Education has published its first university rankings focusing on Asia.
I'll be honest... I visited their website, and while it is chock full of interesting articles on a variety of subjects, I am unsure why they feel they are qualified to provide rankings on Asian universities. But what the hell do I know? I'm probably not qualified to make comments on them.
Regardless—and I use that word correctly—Times High Education appears to be a well-run, U.K.-based (not the University of Kentucky) site dealing with education of the masses on a variety of intellectual levels.
The ranking, in question, includes the South Asia (it just added Malaysia) and the Middle East, featuring the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Turkey, which must no longer come as a shock to Turkey, which had until recently been trying to gain membership into the EU (European Union), and instead has begun to look east for like-minded partners.
Regardless of who was included in the university rankings, schools from East Asia were the ones that stood out in the minds of Times Higher Education, which I can only assume they came up with the double entendre name after being high, making it a triple entendre.
I'm just having fun THE (or did you mean THC?). Leash your hounds.
According to the THE (is it pronounced 'thee' or 'thuh'?), of its Top 100 rankings, Japan has the most on the list at 22, followed by 17 for Taiwan, 15 for China and 14 for South Korea.
With apologies to David Lettermen, here's a Top 10 list of schools:
- University of Tokyo (Japan);
- National University of Singapore (Singapore);
- University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong);
- Peking University (China);
- Pohang University of Science and Technology (South Korea);
- Tsinghua University (China);
- Kyoto University (Japan);
- Seoul National University (South Korea);
- Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong);
- Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (South Korea).
Now, I must admit that while Japan does have decent overall representation on the Top 100, and did grab hold of the Number One spot, it only had two universities/upper educational institutions in the Top 10.
China also grabbed two spots (#4 and #6), as did Hong Kong (#3 and #9), but South Korea had three (#5, #8, and #10).
Tiny city/state Singapore had an institution come in at #2—but that's pretty damn good considering it's such a small country!
Hong Kong also earned raves from the THE, with six universities in the Top 100, an impressive fact considering it has a total population of seven million.
And whither India? Despite the stereotype of Indian students all over Canada and the U.S. blowing test curves out of the water, the THE was not impressed with its efforts in higher education—probably explaining why there is a large exodus of people leaving the country for better education—as the sub-continent only had three institutions listed in the Top 100 - none of them universities.
I'll tell you for free (because I usually charge to speak - but not to write), my parents left India when they wanted to start a family, and after a brief stay in England, looked to live in either Canada, the U.S. or Australia, as each of these primarily English-speaking nations had what was then in the 1960s, a higher standard of education. I have seven years of post-secondary education, and am over-qualified for the tiny salary I make. I guess I'm not as smart as I thought I were. Or some sort of grammatical fart like that.
What did suck, if you'll pardon my colloquialism, if the fact that while the THE seems to
gone to a great effort to hire Thomson Reuters to collect, analyze and verify the data - and then to get one of their capable writers to write the news story, it is lacking in detail.While it might be prudent to actually publish the list of the Top 100, I'll give the The a mulligan on that. Instead, I wonder just what the hell these rankings are all about!
The writer does note that there were 13 performance indicators used to create the annual THE World University Rankings, but does not actually mention what any of those performance indicators are. This is their rankings, written by their writer on their site. If not there, then where, do I get the data? If it's somewhere on the THE website, provide a link to it. But please don't tell me I need to get my data from an accompanying video?
I would like to know what the performance indicators are, so that I could at least assume that the rankings were achieved fairly. I'm sure it was, but wouldn't you like to know how the results were calculated?
If you click HERE, you can see the the Top 100 rankings on the THE site. There is a clickable link on their web story, but it's not as intuitive as they believe.
Cheers
Andrew Joseph
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