Ajou News

NEW Ajou the Highest Rising Korean University on QS World University Rankings

  • 2020-07-07
  • 3952
 
Ajou University has managed to elevate its standing on the QS World University Rankings for two consecutive years. Published annually by Quacquarelli Symonds, based in Britain, the QS Rankings include over 5,500 universities around the world.
 
Ajou found itself in the 551st to 560th ranking on QS World University Rankings 2020, released on May 10. Ranking between the 651st and the 700th in 2018, Ajou has managed to rise since then, first to the 601st to the 650th in 2019, and now to the 551st to the 560th. Stepping up over 100 ranks in just two years makes Ajou the highest Korean university in the rankings.
 
Ajou has been making innovations to higher education, particularly with its Blue Semester Program, enabling students to plan and design their own credit requirements. Last year, the university even launched Blue Semester Extreme, encouraging students to identify social and industrial problems and crowd-source solutions.
 
Ajou has also been supporting large-scale interdisciplinary research groups to promote research innovation, paving the way for faculty members from diverse departments to work together on cutting-edge subjects, such as big data and self-driving cars. The university has also increased its research grants for new faculty members (up to KRW 100 million each in sciences and engineering, and up to KRW 50 million each in the humanities and social sciences) to encourage young researchers to take on bold and long-term research projects. The university’s support for post-doctoral fellows has increased likewise.
 
University President Park Hyung-ju commented: “Universities today are not simple channels for imparting knowledge. They have a new mission to prepare individuals to connect the dots across disciplines and solve actual problems. Universities should go over and beyond their traditional role of producing and imparting knowledge, and take active interest in solving social and industrial problems.”
 
Ben Sowter, Senior Vice President at QS, also picked Ajou as the most attention-worthy university in this year’s rankings.
 
He explained: “Ajou University has risen up the ranks at a remarkable pace, performing particularly well in terms of academic reputation and education settings. It is a university that deserves to be known, not just in Asia, but around the world.”
 
QS World University Rankings rank universities worldwide across four categories—research, education, globalization, and graduates—using six metrics. Academic reputation, based on the opinions of over 100,000 researchers and scholars worldwide (40 percent) and employer reputation, based on assessment by over 50,000 industry insiders (10 percent), together make up 50 percent of the score. The other metrics are faculty-student ratio (20 percent), international faculty ratio (five percent), international student ratio (five percent), and number of citations per faculty (20 percent) based on the SCOPUS database.
 
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) topped this year’s rankings, followed Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Stanford University, Harvard University, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the University of Oxford. The National University of Singapore (11th) was the highest-ranking Asian university, followed by Nanyang Technological University (13th), Tsinghua University (15th), the University of Hong Kong (22nd), and Peking University (23rd).