UM plummets down rankings

The University of Macau has fallen off the list created by the Times Higher Education (THE) group ranking The World’s Most International Universities 2017. The institution, located on Hengqin island, had previously ranked 6th on the list of 150 worldwide institutions praised for their international focus.
The neighbouring SAR’s University of Hong Kong topped the list of other universities in Asia, scoring third position overall in the ranking – the same position received last year – followed by the National University of Singapore (NUS) according to the London-based THE ranking.
The top two ‘most international universities,’ according to the ranking, are located in Switzerland: the ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the École Polytechnic Fédérale de Lausanne.
Of all the countries ranked – of which the top ten include only the United Kingdom and Australia in addition to those already mentioned – the Swiss universities have the greatest average proportion of international staff and publications co-authored by international peers, both at 62 per cent, as noted by Ellie Bothwell of Times Higher Education.

Changes
While the Chinese University of Hong Kong climbed a great deal in the ranking – moving up from the 108th to 28th position from last year’s ranking – the University of Macau, which made 6th position in the previous annual list, was out this time from the list of 150 institutions that scored on the 2017 ranking.
Dramatic variations noted year-on-year can be attributable to the fact that the ranking methodology has factored in, for the first time, a university’s ‘international reputation,’ which accounts for 25 per cent of the total score.
The international reputation is ‘a measure of the ratio of international votes to domestic votes that the institution achieved in THE’s annual invitation-only Academic Reputation Survey, which asks leading scholars to name the world’s best universities for teaching and research in their field,’ notes Bothwell.
South China Morning Post quotes Phil Baty, THE’s world university rankings editor, as saying that the survey was conducted with 10,000 scholars around the world.
The other three factors accounting for the ranking were proportions of the number of international students hosted by the university, of its international staff, and academic staff’s journal publications with at least one international co-author.

Regional competition
Although the National University of Singapore had a higher score for international reputation (95.9) than HKU (88), the latter had the highest score on the list for international staff, students, and co-authors, at 99.4.
The University of Macau came in at 88th position under the ‘150 under 50 Rankings 2016,’ a ranking noting the top 150 universities around the globe les than 50 years old, and ranked 401–500 in THE’s flagship ‘World University Rank 2017.’
Both rankings use the same 13 performance indicators measuring institutions on their teaching, research, citations, international outlook and knowledge transfer.
Another of THE’s rankings, the ‘Asia University Rankings 2017,’ will be launched on March 15 during the THE Asia Universities Summit at the University of Ulsan in South Korea.