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IIT Bombay, Delhi and IISc stay in the lead among Indian institutions

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, IIT Delhi and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru continued to lead the country in the latest QS World University Rankings 2022. These three were also the only Indian institutions that made it to the top 200 globally.

Leading global higher education analysts QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) released the 18th edition of one of the most-consulted international university rankings, which featured a total 35 Indian institutions, of which seven were new entrants.

IIT Bombay retained its status as India’s number-one for the fourth consecutive year but fell five places over last year to jointly rank 177, followed by IIT Delhi, which rose eight places to 185, and IISc that jointly ranked 186.

QS uses six indicators to compile the ranking: Academic reputation (AR), employer reputation (ER), citations per faculty (CPF), faculty/student ratio, international faculty ratio and international student ratio.

Indian universities improved their research impact in the CPF metric, relative to global competitors, with 17 Indian universities witnessing a rise in the CPF score, while 12 others recorded a drop in the rating.

According to the CPF indicator, when universities were adjusted for faculty size, IISc Bengaluru ranked the world’s top research university, achieving a perfect score of 100/100 for this metric. And IIT Guwahati ranked among the top-50 research institutions with a CPF score of 41.

As a sector, Indian universities have made consistent progress in QS’s AR metric with 20 of the 35 entrants improving their scores, while nine experienced a drop in the AR rank.

Indian universities, however, continued to struggle in QS’s measure of institutional teaching capacity. Of India’s 35 universities, 23 suffered declines in QS’s faculty/student ratio indicator, while six recorded improvements. No Indian university ranked among the top 250 for faculty/student ratio.

Commenting on Indian universities' performance in the rankings, Ben Sowter, director of research at QS, said: "This year’s edition of the QS World University Rankings demonstrates the excellent work that many Indian universities are doing to improve their research footprint, with positive consequences for their reputation on the global stage. Conversely, our dataset also suggests that the Indian higher education sector is still struggling to provide adequate teaching capacity. Further expansion of provision – both within universities and across the sector as a whole – will be necessary if India is to continue reaching new heights."

Also, seven of the Indian institutions that featured in the list improved their position, while an equal number dropped in rank; and, 14 maintained their earlier position.

Following the top three Indian institutions was IIT Madras that rose 20 places to rank at joint 255th, its highest position since 2017. Then came IIT Kanpur (277), IIT Kharagpur (280) and IIT Guwahati (395), recording a big jump in their previous year ranks by 73, 34 and 75 places, respectively. Among these, IIT Kanpur attained its highest rank since 2016, while IIT Guwahati broke into the global top-400 for the first time in the QS World University Rankings.

Globally, Massachusetts Institute of Technology achieved a record-extending tenth consecutive year as world number-one. The University of Oxford rose to the second rank for the first time since 2006, while Stanford University and the University of Cambridge shared the third spot.

This year, QS has listed the world’s top 1,300 universities -- 145 more than last year – across 97 locations. In all, 6,415 institutions were eligible for the survey analysis and 1,705 were assessed for the final table. The results account for the distribution and performance of 14.7 million academic papers published between 2015 and 2019, and the 96 million citations received by those papers; they also account for the expert opinions of over 130,000 academic faculty and over 75,000 employers.