National Taiwan University (NTU) jumped to the 80th place in the latest world university rankings released by a British education network on Monday.
NTU remained the only university in Taiwan to be listed among the top 100 in the annual QS World University Rankings compiled by the QS education network.
The oldest university in the country, NTU climbed from 87th last year to 80th place this year.
Its ranking among the 100 best universities means that it is in the world’s top 0.5 percent, according to Ben Sowter of QS Intelligence Unit.
NTU said its ranking jumped mainly because of higher number of citations overall and per faculty.
Six other Taiwanese universities were listed in the global top 400 rankings, with five rising on the list from last year.
“This year has been an excellent year for Taiwanese universities, particularly in the context of seeing less movement worldwide than we’ve seen before,” Sowter said.
“The top seven universities in Taiwan all gained ground,” he said. “We see one more Taiwanese university in the top 200 and an extra Taiwanese university in the top 400.”
The other Taiwanese universities on the top 400 are National Tsing Hua University (192nd), National Chiao Tung University (238th), National Cheng Kung University (271st), National Yang Ming University (285th), Taipei Medical University (323rd) and National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (396th).
The top 400 schools were ranked individually, but the next 100 were bunched together and not given specific rankings.
National Central University placed somewhere between 401st and 450th, while National Sun Yat-sen University, National Taiwan Normal University and Chang Gung University were ranked between 451st and 500th place.
The rankings of Taiwanese universities were pushed up mainly by an increased number of citations of their research papers, Sowter said.
Some universities also scored higher in the category of employer reputation, which accounts for 10 percent of the total score, because they hired more foreign faculty and the quality of their education has improved, he said.
The QS rankings are based on four key factors — research, teaching, employability and internationalization. The six indicators used are academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty to student ratio, citations per faculty, proportion of international students and proportion of international faculty.
A total of 700 universities in 72 countries were evaluated this year, Sowter said.
The top spot in the rankings was taken by Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the first time, followed by University of Cambridge, Harvard University and University College London.
Rounding out the top 10 were University of Oxford, Imperial College London, Yale University, University of Chicago, Princeton University and California Institute of Technology.
In Asia, University of Hong Kong was the highest ranked at 23rd, followed by National University of Singapore at 25th and University of Tokyo at 30th.
Seven Chinese universities were in the top 200 — Peking University (44th), Tsinghua University (48th), Fudan University (90th), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (125th), Nanjing University (168th), Zhejiang University (170th) and University of Science and Technology of China (186th).
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching