Courtesy the brilliant performance by “Oxbridge” — a term coined to refer to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge — and their high research impact and a large number of international students on its campuses, the United Kingdom has retained its status as the “second most successful higher education system” in the world, according to the latest QS rankings.
The University of Cambridge, ranked second globally behind MIT, is the best UK higher educational institute, followed by the University of Oxford, which has dropped two positions to rank four in the global standings. Both the universities have achieved perfect scores in key parameters such as academic reputation (AR), employer reputation (ER) and faculty-student ratio (FSR).
To put this in perspective, consider the following: Indian Institute of Science, which has emerged as the best Indian performer in the rankings, has a score of 37.6 in academic reputation, 22.9 in employer reputation and 56.3 in faculty-student ratio. But IISc obtained a score of 100 in the citations per faculty parameter (CpF), ahead of Cambridge (92.3) and Oxford (90).
International faculty ratio and international students’ ratio are the other two parameters used to prepare the rankings. Unlike the Oxford and Cambride, most UK universities have slipped across matrices, including AR, ER and FSR.
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Out of the 90 ranked universities, 74 have registered a drop in AR, 77 in ER, and 83 in FSR. But, in the case of prestigious institutions such as UCL, Imperial College London, LSE, the drops are marginal.
Also, 10 UK universities rank among the world’s top 150 in the CpF parameter, which is an indicator of research impact.
QS Director of Research Ben Sowter said, “Perhaps no British research success story has captured the public imagination to the extent that the University of Oxford’s role in developing the ChAdOx1 (Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine) has – and quite rightly. Only UCL has produced a higher number of academic research papers over the last five years, and no British university’s research has enjoyed a higher impact, with almost 1.5 million citations yielded on Oxford’s papers.”