On June 6, 2018, Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings (QS) announced the ranking of the world’s top 1,000 universities. Eighty-five out of the 197 participating countries were named, among which Vietnam made its first appearance with two representatives: Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City and Vietnam National University, Hanoi (VNU). Ranked by criterion, VNU was featured in the world’s Top 500 according to its employer reputation and faculty/student ratio.
According to Prof. Nguyễn Hữu Đức - VNU Vice President, the World University Rankings emphasizes research more than the Asia University Rankings. For example, the weight of Academic reputation has been raised to 40%. In addition, QS World rankings no longer measures institutional research quality based on an institution’s number of articles, but by calculating the total number of citations received by all papers produced by that institution’s faculty members across a five-year period (20%). The internationalization criteria focus only on the number of international lecturers and students directly involved in teaching and learning to earn a diploma at a university (10%).
This year, 4,763 universities from 151 countries were evaluated and 1,011 universities from 85 countries were qualified for final rankings. Vietnam National University, HCM City is listed in Group 701-750 and Vietnam National University, Hanoi is featured in Group 801-1,000.
According to Prof. Nguyễn Hữu Đức, the current rankings show that the two national universities’ academic quality is approaching international standards and with more publications and higher citation index, they are more widely recognized. Specifically, the average citation index of each article has increased, namely the average citation index of VNU’s articles has reached 4.2 times per lecturer.
He also advised that during the conference on “Creating excellent universities – Experiences from Russia and emerging nations” held in Moscow in May, 2018, educators had agreed that the potential of a nation was measured by the number of its excellent universities, not of its modern fighter aircraft and naval ships.
QS World University Rankings is an annual publication of university rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), United Kingdom.
Universities are evaluated according to the following six metrics: Academic reputation, Employer reputation, Faculty/Student ratio, Citations per faculty, International faculty ratio and International student ratio.