Both the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings and that announced by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) have placed KAIST at 79th place overall, 10 places down from last year’s THE-QS list. This would mark the very first time since 2006 that KAIST’s standings in the QS and THE rankings have dropped.

One of the intended purposes of the QS ranking system has been to recognize universities as multi-faceted organizations, and for this it evaluates universities based on the following four criteria: quality of research, quality of education, globalization, and contributions of graduates to society. Under these four categories, it uses six different indicators. Academic peer review, weighting 40 percent of the score, is collected with the use of a survey asking active academics across the world about the top universities in fields they know about. Participants can name up to 30 institutes but are not able to vote for their own. Recruiter review, weighting 10 percent, is obtained by a similar method to the academic peer review, except that it surveys employers who hire graduates globally. The faculty to student ratio constitutes 20 percent of the score, while the citations-per-faculty data is used to give a further 20 percent of the university’s score. Finally, the university’s international orientation, measured by its proportion of international students and faculty, give 10 percent of the final score.

Under this system, KAIST’s standing in its areas of study did not change significantly from last year, coming in at 24th overall in Engineering and Information Technology, 57th in Natural Sciences, and 82th in Life Sciences. This amounts to KAIST ranking first in Engineering and second for both Natural Sciences and Life Sciences among Korean universities. However, with respect to overall scores, Seoul National University (SNU) at 50th place topped the national list.

THE, in association with the media company Thompson Reuters, evaluated universities in a rather similar fashion on five criteria: teaching (the learning environment), research (volume, income and reputation of), citations (citations on research published), industry income (research income from industry), and international mix (number of international students and faculty). Thirteen different statistics were used to give the final score of a particular school. The average number of citations per research produced at the university constituted 32.5 percent, while data obtained from reputation surveys on research was used to derive 19.5 percent. Reputational surveys on the professors’ teaching were used to evaluate a further 15 percent, and PhD awards per academic at the university made up 6 percent of the total score.

On the THE list, KAIST at 79th was significantly outranked by the Pohang Institute of Science and Technology (POSTECH: overall 27th). KAIST did not make it into any of the top 50 universities lists for any of its research areas including: Engineering and Technology, Life Sciences, and Physical Sciences. In contrast, POSTECH made it into all of the three lists mentioned. In total, four Korean universities made it to the top 200 overall list, with Seoul National University (109th) and Yonsei University (190th) coming behind POSTECH and KAIST. KAIST’s performance this year was attributed to THE’s emphasis on the number of citations per research without properly considering the research environment of each institute in question (such as faculty size, number of papers, etc.). KAIST was, however, still ranked the 10th best institute in Asia.

The lists were dominated by institutes from the US and the UK, with Harvard University and Cambridge University heading the THE and QS rankings, respectively. However, Asian universities were noted to have performed better than in previous years, with various institutes from China and Japan making it on the lists.

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