Warwick nears top 50 of world’s universities

Warwick University rose eleven places in this year’s Times Higher Education and QS Top Universities, nearing the University’s goal of entering the top 50 world universities by 2015.

Warwick is now placed 58th in the world, compared to 69th last year, but is still one short of it’s ranking in 2007.

Warwick has steadily risen in the rankings since its 80th position at their inception in 2004, but suffered a dip down to 69th last year.

Warwick is also 33rd in the top 50 universities for social sciences, up two places from last year. However, it does not appear in the top 50 for engineering and IT, arts and humanities, sciences and biomedicine or natural sciences.

Peter Dunn, Press Officer for the University, said, “One has to take every individual newspaper league table with at least a pinch of salt as they all vary in how they calculate their tables.

“What one can say is that every table ranks us in the top ten in the UK, and all rank us as the top university in the Midlands, and that consistent result must mean something. However we would not take upward or downward movement in any one table in itself as indicator one should swear by.”

The criteria behind the THE-QS rankings are based on five categories.

Research excellence, teaching excellence, international outlook (measured by both student and staff numbers), academic peer review and graduate employability are compiled together to create a point score for each university.

Warwick’s position in the table was lowered in particular by its score of 36 out of 100 in the research excellence section.

The THE-QS judge this by “taking the total number of citations for all papers published from the institution, and then dividing the figure by the number of full-time equivalent staff at the institution.” It is worth twenty percent of the overall mark given to the institution.

Dunn commented, “We came 7th overall in the rather intensive Government research assessment exercise – I think that’s a far better indicator of our true research performance than any subsection of a single newspaper league table.”

Overall the number of American universities in the top 100 has decreased, while the number of Asian universities has increased. This has prompted some commentators to claim that American dominance of higher education may be ending.

Cambridge University remains second in the rankings to Harvard University, while University College London, Imperial College London and Oxford University all remain in the top ten.