Japanese universities dominate the entire Asian set, but only one Japanese university makes it into the top five--that is, University of Tokyo.
QS rankings are now independent of the THES rankings. This Asian rankings list makes for an interesting preview of the world rankings for 2011, which will come out later this year, in direct competition with THES's for our attention. One question that comes to mind is this: If University of Tokyo is number four in Asia, will it even make the top twenty of QS's world rankings?
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/asian-university-rankings/2011
Top Five Universities in Asia
Ranking University
1 The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
2 University of Hong Kong
3 National University of Singapore (NUS)
4 The University of Tokyo
5 The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Showing posts with label THES-QS global rankings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label THES-QS global rankings. Show all posts
08 July 2010
Who evaluates the evaluators? University rankings face shake up and more competition
Nature reports that university rankings are set to change for the better, with more sophisticated tools used to rank the world's HE and research institutions. As we have been following global rankings of universities and how they appear to be prejudiced against Asian institutions (except Hong Kong and Singapore), we thought we would point out this article published earlier this year.
Perhaps the biggest change is that the THES rankings will be based on data from Thomson Reuters from now on, not QS. Meanwhile, QS plans to press on and improve its own methodology. Moreover, other rankings and more nuanced and balanced methodologies are going to challenge the dominance of THES and ARWU (compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China). The former is often criticized as too unbalanced toward 'reputation' and volatile while the latter is said to emphasize scientific research results above all else. However, Japanese institutions fare about as well on both (which is, not very well) even though you might think a research bias would help them on ARWU.
Url and excerpt follows:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100303/full/464016a.html
Published online 3 March 2010 | Nature 464, 16-17 (2010)
excerpt:
Several approaches to university rankings now being developed are switching the emphasis away from crude league tables and towards more nuanced assessments that could provide better guidance for policy-makers, funding bodies, researchers and students alike. They promise to rank universities on a much wider range of criteria, and assess more intangible qualities, such as educational excellence. And the THE ranking list is trying to remake itself in the face of the criticism.
end of excerpt, for entire article see link
Perhaps the biggest change is that the THES rankings will be based on data from Thomson Reuters from now on, not QS. Meanwhile, QS plans to press on and improve its own methodology. Moreover, other rankings and more nuanced and balanced methodologies are going to challenge the dominance of THES and ARWU (compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China). The former is often criticized as too unbalanced toward 'reputation' and volatile while the latter is said to emphasize scientific research results above all else. However, Japanese institutions fare about as well on both (which is, not very well) even though you might think a research bias would help them on ARWU.
Url and excerpt follows:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100303/full/464016a.html
Published online 3 March 2010 | Nature 464, 16-17 (2010)
excerpt:
Several approaches to university rankings now being developed are switching the emphasis away from crude league tables and towards more nuanced assessments that could provide better guidance for policy-makers, funding bodies, researchers and students alike. They promise to rank universities on a much wider range of criteria, and assess more intangible qualities, such as educational excellence. And the THE ranking list is trying to remake itself in the face of the criticism.
end of excerpt, for entire article see link
16 December 2009
Profile of Japan's top university--U. of Tokyo (Toudai)
Recently Toudai dropped out of the THES-QS top 20 ranking of universities worldwide. I thought this would be a good time to run an alternative version of an earlier piece on the University of Tokyo.
---------------------------
It is unique and elite
When the university system of Japan is compared internationally, one institution is most often cited as Japan's best example of a 'world-class' university. This is, of course, the University of Tokyo (Toukyou Daigaku' or 'Toudai' for short). Toudai is perhaps most famous for graduating and networking elite bureaucrats and politicians, including prime ministers; however, the supposed lock on leadership in top government has waned over the past two decades. For example, this century's most popular prime minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, and many of his advisors were graduates of the private elite Keio University.
Historically speaking, Toudai has the unique distinction of belonging to two important groups of universities: First, it was established almost at the very start of the imperial restoration in 1877 as the 'national university' of Japan. A decade later it became the top institution of a group referred to collectively as the imperial universities ('teikoku daigaku') run by the national government in Japan, but extended to Korea and Taiwan as well. These eventually formed a system of nine institutions which gave all their respective countries or Japanese regions their top institutions.
Second, University of Tokyo is the foremost (and only national-public) member of Japan's 'Ivy League' of six elite Tokyo institutions (the other five being the private universities of Waseda, Keio, Housei, Meiji, and the Christian Rikkyou). Like its five private elite counterparts, Toudai's traditions and its reputation go back to the Meiji Restoration, a tumultuous period of forced westernization and development. Interestingly, one tradition did not survive the transition to modernity: foreign academics used to comprise the majority of the teaching and research faculty at the national universities during the Meiji and Showa eras, whereas now, in the era of internationalization and globalization, they are but a small percentage.
Toudai joins a third group of institutions in the mass era of HE in Japan
In the post-second world war era, stemming from the Occupation's reform of Japanese university education in 1949 but also in response to the needs of the development state, Toudai has flourished at the pinnacle of an expanded, much less elite national university system, which had grown to a total of nearly 100 institutions. However, after a period of top-down administrative reforms and forced mergers starting in the 1990s, the 87 remaining national universities were given new corporate charters and a considerable degree of administrative independence in April 2004.
Big, diverse and diversified by Japanese university standards
The newly corporatised University of Tokyo consists of three campuses, all in the Kanto region (with other facilities scattered about Tokyo and other parts of Japan). It has a total enrolment of around 28,000 students (quite large for Japan) coming from top senior high schools (and cram schools) from all over the country. Toudai also plays host to 2,100 of Japan's population of 120,000 international students (the largest total in Japan, with Chinese nationals forming the single largest group). Toudai has a faculty of 2,800 professors, associate professors, and lecturers. Annually some 2,200 foreign researchers visit for short and long periods of exchange. Toudai is a co-educational, multi-disciplinary university with a comprehensive range of taught programs, post-graduate research, and professional schools (such as its legendary law school).
Perhaps this enormous diversity in faculties, disciplines, and programmes reveal the university as a 'jack of all trades, but master of none' when compared to more focused, dynamic institutions. Like its cross-town rival, Waseda, Toudai's most famous and revered alumni are perhaps its literary figures, such as Soseki Natsume, Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, and Nobel winners, Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe. And, although the university can claim some top prizes in science and technology, the Toudai academic who last won a Nobel, Masatoshi Koshiba in 2002, did so for work on cosmic neutrino detection done in the 1980s. Kyoto University has more top prizes in science, including Nobels, and Tohoku University and University of Tsukuba are both widely considered to be more on the cutting edge in many important areas of scientific research.
Waves of reform in university education during the 1990s brought about sweeping changes in curriculum, graduate education, doctoral level research, and national university administration. The better managed and financed of Toudai's rivals took aim at beating the institution in certain niches, such as in the establishment of western style professional schools in law, business and accounting. Moreover, with their ties to industry and manufacturing, institutions such as the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Nagoya Institute of Technology have emerged as more effectively focused on science and technology with actual commercial applications.
The University of Tokyo has tried to meet such challenges through the establishment of new graduate schools of an interdisciplinary or innovative nature: Frontier Sciences, Interdisciplinary information Studies, Information Science and Technology, and Public Policy. Because of the extent of direct subsidy from the national government (either in bloc grants or through competition), the university also hosts some top research institutes, such as its Institute of Medical Science, Earthquake Research Institute, Institure for Cosmic Ray Research, and the Institute for Solid State Physics.
Where Toudai outdoes the West, it is largely unknown in the West
Perhaps where Toudai is most on the cutting edge of science and technology, its people and their accomplishments are also the most unheralded. One very good example of this is Prof. Ken Sakamura's TRON OS project launched in 1984. The successful development of TRON was initially hampered by trade concerns under the US's Super 301 Trade Law (which largely kept it off personal computers because of a fear of reprisals) but was held back also by a lack of cooperation amongst competing companies unused to working together on an 'open source' project.
In its most successful manisfestations, TRON is an embedded operating system running such ubiquitious devices as mobile phones, fax machines, kitchen appliances, car navigation systems, etc. It is estimated that some form of TRON now runs over 3 billion such electronic appliances worldwide, making it the world's most popular (but still largely unknown) OS. Because of the speed advantages in TRON computing, even proponents of Linux and Windows computing are now working with the TRON project to produce portable, personal computing and communications devices and hybrid operating systems--the software that will run the hardware that will be required in the coming age of ubiquitous, fully networked computing. TRON, either by itself or in combination with Linux, could also play a major role in a recently announced pan-Asian effort to create an open-source OS for personal computing and the internet.
It would seem that it is with computers that Toudai continues to excel. About the time the TRON OS was really taking off as the embedded OS for Japanese electronic appliances, another research group at the University of Tokyo started the MD Grape project in order to design computer chips for supercomputers doing calculations in astrophysics. Researchers at Riken, a super group of national research institutes and centers in Japan, have adapted Toudai's MD Grape chip for applications in life sciences and molecular dynamics. Meanwhile, research at the University of Tokyo continues in order to develop a more general purpose chip capable of an incredible one trillion plus calculations per second.
-------------------------
See also:
http://www.topuniversities.com/
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2009/results
---------------------------
Is University of Tokyo Japan's only world-class university?
Charles Jannuzi, University of Fukui, Japan
It is unique and elite
When the university system of Japan is compared internationally, one institution is most often cited as Japan's best example of a 'world-class' university. This is, of course, the University of Tokyo (Toukyou Daigaku' or 'Toudai' for short). Toudai is perhaps most famous for graduating and networking elite bureaucrats and politicians, including prime ministers; however, the supposed lock on leadership in top government has waned over the past two decades. For example, this century's most popular prime minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, and many of his advisors were graduates of the private elite Keio University.
Historically speaking, Toudai has the unique distinction of belonging to two important groups of universities: First, it was established almost at the very start of the imperial restoration in 1877 as the 'national university' of Japan. A decade later it became the top institution of a group referred to collectively as the imperial universities ('teikoku daigaku') run by the national government in Japan, but extended to Korea and Taiwan as well. These eventually formed a system of nine institutions which gave all their respective countries or Japanese regions their top institutions.
Second, University of Tokyo is the foremost (and only national-public) member of Japan's 'Ivy League' of six elite Tokyo institutions (the other five being the private universities of Waseda, Keio, Housei, Meiji, and the Christian Rikkyou). Like its five private elite counterparts, Toudai's traditions and its reputation go back to the Meiji Restoration, a tumultuous period of forced westernization and development. Interestingly, one tradition did not survive the transition to modernity: foreign academics used to comprise the majority of the teaching and research faculty at the national universities during the Meiji and Showa eras, whereas now, in the era of internationalization and globalization, they are but a small percentage.
Toudai joins a third group of institutions in the mass era of HE in Japan
In the post-second world war era, stemming from the Occupation's reform of Japanese university education in 1949 but also in response to the needs of the development state, Toudai has flourished at the pinnacle of an expanded, much less elite national university system, which had grown to a total of nearly 100 institutions. However, after a period of top-down administrative reforms and forced mergers starting in the 1990s, the 87 remaining national universities were given new corporate charters and a considerable degree of administrative independence in April 2004.
Big, diverse and diversified by Japanese university standards
The newly corporatised University of Tokyo consists of three campuses, all in the Kanto region (with other facilities scattered about Tokyo and other parts of Japan). It has a total enrolment of around 28,000 students (quite large for Japan) coming from top senior high schools (and cram schools) from all over the country. Toudai also plays host to 2,100 of Japan's population of 120,000 international students (the largest total in Japan, with Chinese nationals forming the single largest group). Toudai has a faculty of 2,800 professors, associate professors, and lecturers. Annually some 2,200 foreign researchers visit for short and long periods of exchange. Toudai is a co-educational, multi-disciplinary university with a comprehensive range of taught programs, post-graduate research, and professional schools (such as its legendary law school).
Perhaps this enormous diversity in faculties, disciplines, and programmes reveal the university as a 'jack of all trades, but master of none' when compared to more focused, dynamic institutions. Like its cross-town rival, Waseda, Toudai's most famous and revered alumni are perhaps its literary figures, such as Soseki Natsume, Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, and Nobel winners, Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe. And, although the university can claim some top prizes in science and technology, the Toudai academic who last won a Nobel, Masatoshi Koshiba in 2002, did so for work on cosmic neutrino detection done in the 1980s. Kyoto University has more top prizes in science, including Nobels, and Tohoku University and University of Tsukuba are both widely considered to be more on the cutting edge in many important areas of scientific research.
Waves of reform in university education during the 1990s brought about sweeping changes in curriculum, graduate education, doctoral level research, and national university administration. The better managed and financed of Toudai's rivals took aim at beating the institution in certain niches, such as in the establishment of western style professional schools in law, business and accounting. Moreover, with their ties to industry and manufacturing, institutions such as the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Nagoya Institute of Technology have emerged as more effectively focused on science and technology with actual commercial applications.
The University of Tokyo has tried to meet such challenges through the establishment of new graduate schools of an interdisciplinary or innovative nature: Frontier Sciences, Interdisciplinary information Studies, Information Science and Technology, and Public Policy. Because of the extent of direct subsidy from the national government (either in bloc grants or through competition), the university also hosts some top research institutes, such as its Institute of Medical Science, Earthquake Research Institute, Institure for Cosmic Ray Research, and the Institute for Solid State Physics.
Where Toudai outdoes the West, it is largely unknown in the West
Perhaps where Toudai is most on the cutting edge of science and technology, its people and their accomplishments are also the most unheralded. One very good example of this is Prof. Ken Sakamura's TRON OS project launched in 1984. The successful development of TRON was initially hampered by trade concerns under the US's Super 301 Trade Law (which largely kept it off personal computers because of a fear of reprisals) but was held back also by a lack of cooperation amongst competing companies unused to working together on an 'open source' project.
In its most successful manisfestations, TRON is an embedded operating system running such ubiquitious devices as mobile phones, fax machines, kitchen appliances, car navigation systems, etc. It is estimated that some form of TRON now runs over 3 billion such electronic appliances worldwide, making it the world's most popular (but still largely unknown) OS. Because of the speed advantages in TRON computing, even proponents of Linux and Windows computing are now working with the TRON project to produce portable, personal computing and communications devices and hybrid operating systems--the software that will run the hardware that will be required in the coming age of ubiquitous, fully networked computing. TRON, either by itself or in combination with Linux, could also play a major role in a recently announced pan-Asian effort to create an open-source OS for personal computing and the internet.
It would seem that it is with computers that Toudai continues to excel. About the time the TRON OS was really taking off as the embedded OS for Japanese electronic appliances, another research group at the University of Tokyo started the MD Grape project in order to design computer chips for supercomputers doing calculations in astrophysics. Researchers at Riken, a super group of national research institutes and centers in Japan, have adapted Toudai's MD Grape chip for applications in life sciences and molecular dynamics. Meanwhile, research at the University of Tokyo continues in order to develop a more general purpose chip capable of an incredible one trillion plus calculations per second.
-------------------------
See also:
http://www.topuniversities.com/
http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2009/results
10 December 2009
Japan slips elite private university into Times-QS top 200 global rankings
In the first post on this year's rankings, I wrote:
Perhaps one aspect worth a closer look is how Japan's elite private universities fared. None are in the top 100, but are any rising or entering the top 200? That is worth a future post here at the Japan HEO Blog.
THES''s own article on the topic answers the question. Keio University makes its debut in the top 200--and even makes it into the top 150.
excerpt:
Japan counts 11 institutions in the top 200, among them two new entrants: the University of Tsukuba sharing 174th place and Keio University making an impressive debut at 142nd. Japan's representatives in the top 100 rose in number from four to six, led by the University of Tokyo at 22nd place (down from 19th).
See the entire article on THES online:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408560
Perhaps one aspect worth a closer look is how Japan's elite private universities fared. None are in the top 100, but are any rising or entering the top 200? That is worth a future post here at the Japan HEO Blog.
THES''s own article on the topic answers the question. Keio University makes its debut in the top 200--and even makes it into the top 150.
excerpt:
Japan counts 11 institutions in the top 200, among them two new entrants: the University of Tsukuba sharing 174th place and Keio University making an impressive debut at 142nd. Japan's representatives in the top 100 rose in number from four to six, led by the University of Tokyo at 22nd place (down from 19th).
See the entire article on THES online:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408560
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Back to top
Click on logo to go back to top page.