QAU ranked among top 100 in Asian Universities

Islamabad: According to the Global Education rankings for 2017, the Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU) in Islamabad has been ranked among the top 100 universities in Asia.

Though, the university had fallen 43 spots in rankings of the top 500 international universities 2 years ago.

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The ranking, by the World Report and US news, lists the university at 95^th among Asian universities. Hence, QAU is the only university from Pakistan which has been included in the list of top Asian Universities in the ranking list.

But, in the international rankings, the university ranks at 539 along with a global score of 49.1. This was down from 496 universally that US News and World Report had placed it on the 2015 rankings.

The regional rankings have been picked up by East Asian countries particularly with Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Singaporean universities making up the top 10 Asian universities.

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University of Tokyo, National University of Singapore and Peking University were placed as the top three Asian universities in the ranking list.

The rankings of higher learning institutions by US News and World report was released on Sunday evening, rank institutions based on 12 indicators.

These indicators include global and regional research reputation, publications, books, conferences, normalized citation impact, total citations, number of publications which are among the 10% most cited, percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited, international cooperation, number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited in their respective field, percentage of total publications that are among the top one per cent most highly cited papers.

According to the officials, the ranking is highly regarded as it is more quality oriented whereas the other rankings like QS and Times Higher Education Rankings, give more weightage to quantity.

The faculty as well as the officials of QAU said that the university had achieved this distinction in spite of being crippled by financial constraints including a obstinate budget deficit in the range of Rs500-600 million rupees for several years.

The officials further added that its PC-1 and development funding by the HEC and government of Pakistan have also been stalled.

Noting the drop in ranking, the Assistant Professor of QAU as well as an official spokesperson of the university, Dr Ilhan Niaz, explained that the overall score of the university had improved from 30 to 49.1.

Dr Niaz said that it shows an actual improvement in the university.

“In spite of all the constraints the QAU faculty is delivering while other well-funded university along with gigantic infrastructure seem to be nowhere in the ranking,” he added.