National Taiwan University (NTU) was on Thursday ranked the world’s 113th-best university, falling 16 places from its ranking last year in a Times Higher Education survey.
NTU remained the best-performing institution from among 40 Taiwanese universities to make the London-based magazine’s World University Rankings 2022, but it fell from 97th place in last year’s ranking, when it became the first university based in Taiwan to crack the survey’s top 100.
The most recent rankings covered 1,662 higher-learning institutions across 99 countries and territories. It was the highest number of schools analyzed since the rankings were first published in 2011.
The latest rankings used 13 indicators to measure an institution’s performance across five areas: teaching, research, citations, knowledge transfer and international outlook.
NTU placed in the top 100 in teaching and research, ranking 76th and 63rd respectively, but it finished outside the top 500 in citations, outside the top 700 in international outlook and 155th in knowledge transfer.
Its scores in the three most heavily weighted categories — teaching, research and citations — were all down from last year.
NTU acknowledged the setback, attributing it to the relatively cutthroat competition among higher-learning institutions, and said the university would strive to improve in the areas in which it was lacking in the rankings.
Still, NTU remained among the top 120 schools for a third straight year after nearly falling out of the top 200 as recently as 2017 and 2018, when it placed 195th and 198th respectively.
The best university of 2022, as ranked by the report, was the University of Oxford in England for a sixth consecutive year, followed by the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University in the US, both tied for second.
Taiwan increased the number of universities that made the cut, squeezing 40 schools into the ranking, compared with 38 listed last year.
Taipei Medical University was ranked among a group of schools from 201st to 250th, the highest for any university other than NTU since National Tsing Hua University was ranked among the 226-to-250 tier in 2013.
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