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Three Thai universities have improved their standing in the QS World University Rankings for 2021, released by UK-based education and career consultancy Quacquarelli Symonds (QS).
According to the list, Chulalongkorn University (CU) earned top rank in the Thai University pool for the eighth consecutive year, moving up 39 positions, from 247th place last year to 208th this year. The second-highest placed Thai university, Mahidol, ranked 252nd, up an impressive 62 spots from last year’s placing.
Thammasart University emerged as the country’s third best gainer, moving up from the 651-700 group to to 561-570 band.
Anek Laothamatas, Minister of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, stated that education and career consultant Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) has published the rankings for top universities worldwide based on disciplines.
Chulalongkorn University was ranked highly in four disciplines: performing arts, engineering-petroleum, development studies, and social policy and administration. Meanwhile, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang ranked high in the engineering-petroleum category while Kasetsart University was one of the top rankings in the agriculture & forestry category.
According to QS rankings, institutions such as Chulalongkorn University, Mahidol University, Chiang Mai University, and Thammasat University were ranked for more subjects this year than the previous year. This demonstrates that Thai universities have worked hard to improve their education programs, which leads to global recognition and higher rankings on the QS list. Chiang Mai University was ranked in the 601-650 bracket, and Kasetsart University, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Khon Kaen University and Prince of Songkla University were in the 801-1,000 bracket.
QS does not assign specific positions for universities rated below 500.
CU rector Bundhit Eua-arporn said this year’s ranking was a big achievement. The list showed the university earned good scores in a number of areas. “Chulalongkorn University is particularly proud of this accomplishment as the university placed the highest among Thai universities in this area for the eighth consecutive year,” he said.
QS ranked 1,000 universities from 80 different locations, surveyed 102,662 academics and 51,649 employers whose insights and opinions informed the reputational indicators. QS also analysed 18,530,368 research papers and 138,397,765 citations, recorded by the bibliometric database Scopus/Elsevier.
The universities were rated according to six components: academic reputation (40%), employer reputation (10%), faculty-student ratio (20%), citations per faculty (20%), international faculty ratio (5%) and international student ratio (5%).
The University of Oxford, the United Kingdom’s top institution and also Europe’s, fell from fourth to fifth. Its close rival, the University of Cambridge, remained at seventh.
Twenty-six Asian universities were named in the global top-100, the highest number ever. These were split between Mainland China and South Korea (six each), Hong Kong and Japan (five each), Singapore (two), and Malaysia and Taiwan (one each).
In Asia, the top two universities are the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University at the 11th and 13th spot in the rankings respectively.