WHY DO OUR IIT'S NOT FIGURE IN THE TOP 200 UNIVERSITIES OF THE WORLD?

Our IIT’s are considered to be the premier institutions and are of high standing in our country. Surprisingly they do not figure in the lists of top Universities in the world. Of course all those rankings are done mostly by American corporations and they have to be examined a little more before we accept their results.   

There are many US world University rankings but QS is more popular. Let us see what they take into consideration while ranking the Universities.

1.      Academic Reputation.  40%

2.      Employer Reputation.  10%

3.      Faculty StudentRatio. 20%

4.      International Faculty  5%       

5.      International Students 5%

6.      Citations per faculty 20%

Now Academic reputation is something very subjective. If people and professors from the US or Europe are questioned they would not even be aware of our IIT’s and therefore the institutions would score very low on this account. Only when the sample size is picked up from all the countries of the world, the awareness is normalized. It is interesting to see the breakup of the QS sample size-  countrywise to establish its credibility. Moreover, Universities like the Oxford and Cambridge have been around for hundreds of years and are well known. Reputation should be given weightage but a weightage of 40% is much too high.

International faculty is given a weightage of 5% in the rankings. I fail to understand as to in what way International faculty helps academics. Similarly I do not understand why International students should be given 5% weightage. Our IIT’s would score a ‘0” on these parameters.  

About the faculty student ratio I have seen a writeup by IIT, Mumbai students comparing the ratio given by QS with the actual and they found no correlation at all and the QS giving a much lower ratio than the actual.   

It is the citations per faculty where the top Universities are definitely above our IIT’s, but what is the reason for this? Certainly not lack talent or lack of proper guidance. It is money that makes the difference. Universities charge very high fees from the students in the US which helps them fund the research programs. Also massive state funding of Universities for research is done in the US. For example 60% of the University Research is funded by the Federal Government in the US. With our scant allocation to R&D, our Governments can ill afford to do that and citations need money.

We need not feel bad about our IIT’s not being ranked in the top 200 Universities of the world. Despite no ranking their students are very much sought after by all American as well as European Corporations and this alone is sufficient for us to consider them as one of the best in the world irrespective of world rankings. 

At the same time one has to admit that there is no foolproof methodology for ranking the World Universities and any other means can also be similarly challenged. One method for the rankings may be as good as another.  

I am giving below a link to the QS ranking of World Universities.

http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2014#sorting=rank+region=+country=+faculty=+stars=false+search=