World University Rankings And The Global Levelling Up Of Higher Education

When the Italian city of Bologna founded a community of learning in 1088, they needed to come up with a name to describe the world’s first degree-awarding institution of higher learning. They coined the word universitas, to describe what is considered to be the world’s oldest university in continuous operation.

Within a decade, teaching began at what is now The University of Oxford, making it the English-speaking world’s oldest university. Student numbers grew rapidly in the following century when the King of England, Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris, which had emerged around 1150. Think of it as a heavy-handed precursor to the modern-day student visa.

Harvard University came onto the scene in 1636, nearly 250 years before Stanford University on the West Coast. There were no school websites or campus open days to inform candidates and their parents, and no standardized admissions tests. The College Board first offered the SAT in 1926, a test that has been controversial ever since.

And there were no media university rankings. Skip forward to 2023, and Oxford University ranked number 1 in the THE World University Rankings for the eighth consecutive year, followed by Stanford, MIT, Harvard and the University of Cambridge. The University of Bologna ranked 155, and the University of Paris often referred to as the Sorbonne was closed during the French Revolution and then split into 13 universities in 1970 after the student riots of two years earlier. Plus ça change…

The thirst for knowledge has been accompanied in the past 20 years for a thirst for university rankings. In 2004, Times Higher Education partnered with QS Quacquarelli Symonds (I am the S of QS) to publish the THE-QS World University Rankings.

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I subsequently worked with THE for the launch of their own ranking in partnership with Thomson Reuters in 2010. Along with US News and ARWU Shanghai, the rival university league tables attract tens of millions of views every year. The compiled results of all four major media rankings are published by BlueSky Thinking.

From teaching and faculty student rations, research, and academic and employer reputation to citations and publication, international outlook and industry income, each ranking uses a different methodology and measures different things with the inherent limitations of each assessment.

And universities are lining up to take part. 165 universities were ranked for the first time in the THE World University Rankings 2024, including 89 from Asia, 38 from Europe, 19 from Africa, 14 from South America and five from North America.

A global levelling up

For Phil Baty, Chief Global Affairs Officer at Times Higher Education he sees such international engagement as part of a global trend in higher education. “I have talked a lot about an exciting global levelling up, as more universities from outside the global north, and the traditionally dominant nations, the US and UK, make it into the rankings.”

He points out that Asia now numerically beats Europe for participation. Last year five nations made their debuts, all from Africa: Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. “We have seen very significant increases in sign-up for the rankings data submission process, and in the inclusions of universities in the final rankings, as more and more governments and universities worldwide target inclusion in the THE World University Rankings and seek to benchmark their institutions against the world’s research elite.”

Among the new entrants this year, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) from South Korea and Nazarbayev University (NU) in Kazakhstan entered among the top 30% of universities globally. Both were founded within the last 20 years.

“Simply appearing in Times Higher Education World University Rankings is a cause for real celebration,” Baty says enthusiastically. “This marks a symbolic step onto the world stage to an audience of millions, and representing membership of a community of like-minded research universities committed to sharing data, benchmarking against the world’s best, and recruiting and collaborating across borders.”

The top ranked school in Central Asia

“Nazarbayev University’s entry into the rankings, with such a strong placing, at only 13 years old is an exceptional achievement,” insists the THE Chief Global Affairs Officer, “and will no doubt serve as a case study for other aspirational universities.

Launched in 2010 in the city of Astana, surrounded by the beautiful Kazakh Steppe, Nazarbayev is the first university in Kazakhstan guided by the principles of autonomy and academic freedom after post-Soviet rule. They are now the top ranked school in Central Asia.

The THE World University Rankings have a threshold for inclusion based on research output, representing a prestigious global community of less than 2000 research-intensive, well-reputed universities. Research Quality is one such measure in which Nazarbayev University performs particularly well.

Dr Ilesanmi Adesida, Acting President of Nazarbayev University, explains how research excellence at NU has arisen from ensuring academics are involved in both teaching and research: “We’re building an international research university in Central Asia where, historically, research and teaching were separate. Now we are integrating so that everyone knows their job will involve both research and teaching.”

But it’s not just academics getting involved in research. NU also encourages research excellence from students and graduates. Dr Adesida, who previously served as the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) says, “Some graduates return to NU as assistant professors but we wanted students to participate in research in some way apart from becoming academics. We call it research integrated teaching and try to involve them in research from maybe their second year of study.”

Dr Adesida considers debuting in the THE rankings a collective achievement of the faculty and administration,that have worked toward that goal for the past several years. “For me, a leader’s job is to provide a template for faculty and staff to encourage them to work together to make the students successful and to ensure faculty are also successful. The main thing is to excite people and make them reach beyond themselves.

“I always ask, ‘are you ready to make other people successful?’ to understand if individuals are ready to leave their ego behind and realise the success of other people is their own success too.”

Collaboration is at the heart of this approach, making sure you bring the right people together and encourage them to look beyond what they’re doing now into the future. Dr Adesida also points to the importance of collaborations with other institutions. NU facilitates this as part of the Asian Universities Alliance (AUA), a collective of 15 universities in Asia that include National University of Singapore, HKUST, Tsinghua University, the University of Tokyo, IIT Bombay and King Saud University.

The institutions came together to address regional and global challenges related to higher education, as well as economic, scientific and technological development. AUA members share experience in strategy and policy development, exchange staff and students, and provide opportunities to collaborate.

For the President of NU, featuring in the top 30% of the THE World University Rankings provides a number of benefits, “including attracting the best students as they now know they can associate themselves with a well-ranked school after graduation, beneficial for further study and finding jobs.” However, Dr Adesida is conscious of other potential impacts: “We don't want to lose top faculty who could say they are coming from a top-rated university. We of course want them to stay here.”

Ensuring top faculty are retained and not lost to other schools is an important task for any institution as incredibly talented and successful academics are a vital asset. “The only way you can do that is put in place an ecosystem where they can thrive,” insists Dr Adesida. “If they cannot do it here, we provide opportunities to collaborate with other universities.”

Phil Baty at Times Higher Education is already right about Nazarbayev University serving as a case study for other aspirational universities. The National University of Uzbekistan visited the school in October. “They were impressed with what they saw,” recounts Dr Adesida, “and said in 10 years, they want to be like this.”

The President is proud that NU is developing a credible homegrown international research institution in Kazakhstan, “not just inviting other universities to establish branch campuses but actually building it from scratch.”

For other schools that want to rise the ranks or make their rankings debut, Dr Adesida recommends having a laser focus on your objective: “Our objective at NU is to help Kazakhstan train leaders for the future. Ask yourself, what is your vision, your mission? It doesn't matter whether it's politics or history or science or AI. Once you’ve decided on your direction, make sure you bring in people who believe in that mission to help realise it.”

Looking to the future, those at NU are motivated to rise the ranks and reach the top 20% by 2030, and part of that involves attracting the best students. “If you stay in the same place, you're falling behind,” says Dr Adesida. “We are lucky that we're getting the best students in the country, and competing with Korea and Hong Kong and Singapore. The main thing is to keep spirits up, show them the way, and make sure that they have the opportunities to interact with the best students.”

For NU, part of this future endeavour involves AI which the university’s ISSAI (Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence) is focused on. The ISSAI aims to be the driver of research and innovation in the digital sphere of Kazakhstan for AI research.

But how will NU transform this small AI centre into an institute that serves the whole country and potentially further? For Dr Adesida, it’s about bringing together talented people: “The ISSAI is working very hard and we want to choose areas in AI that are most impactful in the region. We can use this to attract the best young local talent so we don't lose them to other countries, and they can then help us build the pool that Kazakhstan needs to start really applying AI to industry.”

In a final statement, Dr Adesida muses on what he wants to see when he looks back on his career: “When I retire, I want to be able to put my legs up and say ‘I have built a place’ and still be proud of it. But my mission and vision for now is to build a top-notch university that will be respected around the world and, like Stanford, still be here 150 years from now.”