Singapore has an excellent education system. This is once again proved by Singapore’s fourth and eighth graders ranking first in science and second only to Hong Kong in an international survey by Boston College. The complete report on the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study can be downloaded here.
Singapore’s excellent school system is complemented by world class universities with the National University of Singapore (NUS) ranked 30th on the 2008 QS Top 100 Universities list. The only Asia Pacific universities ranked higher are Australian National University (16th), University of Tokyo (19th), Kyoto University (25th), and University of Hong Kong (26th). Nanyang Technological University (NTU), also in Singapore, is 77th on the list. The top 10 are
- Harvard
- Yale
- Cambridge
- Oxford
- California Institute of Technology
- Imperial College London
- University College London
- University of Chicago
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Columbia University
Ranked 11th to 15th are all American universities: University of Pennsylvania (11th), Princeton (12th), Duke and Johns Hopkins (13th) and Cornell (15th). Others in the top 20 are Stanford (17th), University of Michigan (18th) and McGill University (20th).
Singapore is naturally proud of its universities, which attract academics and students from various countries.
But Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, Chicago, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, Caltech, Cornell, Penn, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Imperial College, University College London, Tokyo, Kyoto have produced Nobel Prize winners and are regularly in the news for various studies and achievements.
What is it that makes the two Singapore universities, which are much younger and less often in the news, world class?
Visit the QS World University Rankings website and check the detailed rankings.
Singapore universities are world class because they attract international faculty and the highest number of international students in Asia Pacific outside Australia and their academics get good peer reviews. National University of Singapore graduates also get the best employer reviews in all of Asia Pacific outside Australia. But they lag behind other top schools in research work, All these factors are taken into consideration in the world university rankings. But what counts most is academic peer review -– a survey in which more than 100 academics from Singapore took part.
The universities are ranked on these six “indicators”:
| Indicator | Explanation | Weighting |
| Academic peer review | Composite score drawn from peer review survey (which is divided into five subject areas). 6,354 responses in 2008. | 40% |
| Employer review | Score based on responses to employer survey. 2,339 responses in 2008. | 10% |
| Faculty student ratio | Score based on student faculty ratio | 20% |
| Citations per faculty | Score based on research performance factored against the size of the research body | 20% |
| International faculty | Score based on proportion of international faculty | 5% |
| International students | Score based on proportion of international students | 5% |
The National University of Singapore ranks 80th in research performance or citations per faculty. Nanyang Technological University is not among the top 100 in this category. The top 10 are
- California Institute of Technology
- Stanford
- MIT
- University of California, Berkeley
- Harvard
- Princeton
- University of California, San Diego
- University of Toronto
- University of California, Los Angeles
- Johns Hopkins
The National University of Singapore ranks 18th in academic peer review. The only Asia-Pacific universities higher up in this category are Tokyo (14th) and Australian National University (17th). Nanyang Technological University is 68th. A total of 135 academics from Singapore responded to this survey, which attracted fewer respondents from France (125), China (116), Hong Kong (100 ) and Japan (96) but more from India (236), Indonesia (228), the Philippines (201) and Malaysia (180). The highest number of respondents were from America (638), Britain (563), Australia (286), Italy (277) and Canada (239).
NUS ranks 26th in employer review. In Asia Pacific, only Australian universities do better – University of Melbourne, ninth in this category, and 38th overall in the Top 100 list, and Monash University, 15th in this category, and 47th overall. Nanyang Technological University is 79th in this category.
NUS ranks 16th in international faculty. Nanyang Technological University is 14th. City University of Hong Kong is 17th. The top 10 in this category are
- California Institute of Technology
- United Arab Emirates University
- Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
- King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia
- University of Otago, New Zealand
- Ecole Polytechnique Federal du Lausanne, Switzerland
- Curtin University of Technology, Australia
- University of Hong Kong
- Hong Kong Polytechnic University
- University of St Gallen, Switzerland
NUS also attracts the highest number of international students in Asia Pacific outside Australia. It ranks 16th globally in this category. Nanyang Technological University is 18th, one place behind Australia’s Monash University. The top schools in this category are
- London School of Economics and Political Science
- Cranfield University, UK
- School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
- RMIT University, Australia
- ESCP-EAP, Paris
- Curtin University of Technology, Australia
- Ecole Polytechnique Federal du Lausanne, Switzerland
- Imperial College London
- Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
The two Singapore universities are not among the top 100 in the student faculty category. This takes into account the faculty:student ratio. The top schools in this category are
- Karolinska Institute, Sweden
- Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, France
- University of Rochester
- Showa University, Japan
- Vanderbilt University
- Ecole Polytechnique, France
- University of Copenhagen
- Johns Hopkins
- Yale
- Universitat Ulum, Germany
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Nothing to happy about. It is simply business and never a people’s University
International students/faculty have a low overall weighting in their methodology, so it cannot be the main reason. Actually the reason is simpler than that. It is the same reason why ANU is also ranked so highly, and why there are so many European universities in the top 100. QS describes its methodology:
“Weightings are applied both geographically and by discipline to ensure as fair a representative spread as possible. ”
and
“Geographical weightings are again applied to ensure fair representation from ke regions of the world. ”
Singapore and Australia fall into the “Asia-Pacific” region, so in order to ensure “fair representation” from Asia-Pacific universities in the list, the scores of institutions like NUS and ANU were inflated.
Basically, the geographical weighting policy ensures that it is meaningless to compare QS’s scores across the major geographic regions. So for example the scores of European universities cannot be directly compared to those of North American universities, because they weighted the scores so as to ensure ‘fair representation’ of institutions from both regions in the top rankings. And NUS’s ranking above places like Northwestern and Berkeley is similarly meaningless. About all you can say is that NUS is ranked 2nd overall in the Asia-Pacific region, since only ANU is ranked above it from that region.
By the way, I pulled those quotes about their methodology from here:
http://www.topuniversities.com/worlduniversityrankings/methodology/simple_overview/
Misleading. Just one university out of 4 public ones, and one that’s running entirely on government funding and directives. Singapore has just one institution in the top 50… and that too is entirely funded by the government, we’re playing cheat if you ask me…
There is a lot of difference between 70-30 pal. Just one university in the top 30 doesn’t make it all very good you know…