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The recent QS World University Rankings showed no good news for UK’s higher education institutions. The rankings, which was derived via “three extensive datasets,” came to strengthen the warnings ensued by The Commons Science and Technology Committee report.
The warning had been as follows: “UK could risk failing to find enough workers to fill vital jobs in science and industry.” Tracing this scarcity of skills would eventually wound back at the pavements of institutions.
Ranking methodology
To enable ranking by subject, QS optimised its access to the following datasets:
- Global academic surveys
- Employer reputation surveys
- Scopus data (citations per paper indicator)
The QS ranking was able to combed the “top 200 universities in the world in 30 popular disciplines.” Apart from highlighting the lagging position of UK institutions, the ranking paved the identification of the retaining and emerging STEM winners, the US and Asian counterparts, respectively.
Where STEM winners go
The National University of Singapore is able to sweep the global top ten STEM subjects with “five of the engineering and technology disciplines” coming from Singapore’s flagship university. As a whole, Asia surfaced to be the leading spot for fields, like chemical, civil, electrical and mechanical engineering.
The specific figures were as follows:
Asia had 10 of the top 30 institutions in the areas of chemical, civil and electrical engineering and eight for mechanical engineering…
The US institutions, on the other hand, were able to bag all 11 fields: “agriculture, chemical engineering, mathematics, electrical engineering, computer science, physics, materials science, pharmacy, chemistry and earth and marine science.”
The rankings also revealed two reigning universities: Harvard (first ranks for 11 subjects) and MIT (first ranks for nine). While figures were in favour for most Asian and American institutions, UK universities were left bereft with only two fields in top world ranking: psychology and environmental sciences.
In the first field, psychology, a total of 28 UK institutions went to join the world’s top 200 universities. The field of environmental sciences, on the other hand, garnered 27 UK universities. These figures had indeed, made the existence of UK’s university level gap in STEM leadership obvious.
The remaining edge
Despite these disheartening figures, certain fields continue to royally sit at UK’s fine soil. Take for instance Oxford and Cambridge’s “geography, English language and literature, modern languages and history.” These fields show UK’s persisting strength in the areas of arts and the humanities.
Ben Sowter of QS pointed out the transitioning status of Asian institutions and emphasised its impact to UK’s previous ranks:
The UK remains second only to the US, but it now faces far stiffer competition in the STEM disciplines.
This competition consisted of universities from Asian countries, like “Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Korea.” The “traditional research powerhouses,” US and UK, are gradually biting dust. This brings another quagmire for the UK education systems. This calls for another round of reform-review on the part of the Education Department, as well as, the Government.
Last but certainly not the least, this news could impact prospective uni students’ course choices.
Do you believe that this ranking, among other surveys, will spur real change in UK’s STEM curriculum?
