Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings 2020 Ranks LUMS Among Top Asian Universities
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LUMS has been ranked, for the first time, by Times Higher Education (THE) Asia University Rankings, and has been placed among the top 251-300 Asian universities.
THE World University Rankings, founded in 2004, provide a definitive list of the world’s best universities. The organisation evaluates world-class universities against 13 separate performance indicators, covering the full range of a top university’s essential areas of activity.
The Asia University Rankings are based on 13 performance indicators, grouped into five main categories: teaching (the learning environment); research (volume, income and reputation); citations (research influence); international outlook (staff, students, research) and industry income (knowledge transfer). LUMS has achieved an overall score of 24.8-27.2 in all these indicators.
THE has defined various subject categories to collect data for evaluating an institution. For evaluation, LUMS provided data following subject divisions covering all Undergraduate, Graduate and PhD programmes offered at the five schools - Arts and Humanities; Computer Sciences; Electrical Engineering; Life Sciences - Biology; Physical Sciences (Math, Physics, Chemistry); Business Accounting and Economics; Education and Law.
THE holds a strict research criteria for inclusion in their rankings which includes, publication of 1000 research papers in the last five years. However if 80% of the publications are in one subject only, the institute is excluded from its rankings. Also, institutions must offer both, Undergraduate as well as Graduate programmes.
LUMS was included for the first time in THE rankings last year when it was able to reach 1000 publications count as defined in the criteria. The inclusion of LUMS in various categories of THE rankings provides various benefits, the most important one of which is international prominence. Since THE rankings are also research focused, it also gives an insight about the research reputation and research output of LUMS. This year, 14 universities from Pakistan were selected for inclusion in THE Asia Rankings; LUMS is ranked at 4th, which is indeed an achievement. Moreover, the ranking’s results in general are a great source of information for the students, academicians and industry, looking at the performance of an institution.
THE is one of the most reliable ranking systems with a special focus on research impact and reputation. It ranks 1400 universities from across 92 countries, standing as one of the largest and diverse rankings till date. It aims to judge research intensive universities across their core mission i.e., teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.
Rankings agencies in addition to their flagship rankings i.e., World University Rankings have developed various categories to provide users a comparison of similar universities. THE has also developed these divisions; Regional Rankings and Emerging Economies Rankings are two examples of their categories. Both are derived from International Rankings by using the same 13 performance indicators mentioned earlier, however the scores are recalibrated by experts according to ranking nature. For instance, in Asian rankings a relatively higher percentage of the scores is given to Industry Income while in Emerging Economies Rankings, International Outlook and Industry Income is given more weightage, comparatively.
THE Emerging Economies University Rankings 2020 includes only institutions in countries classified by the London Stock Exchange’s FTSE Group as ‘advanced emerging’, ‘secondary emerging’ or ‘frontier’. This ranking uses the same 13 performance indicators as the THE World University Rankings and Asia Rankings to judge institutions but they are recalibrated to reflect the development priorities of universities in emerging economies. Overall, 533 universities from 47 countries or regions are included in the rankings. Pakistan is categorised in Secondary Emerging Countries.
