3 Korean universities rank in world's top 100

K-campus

Published: 27 Sep. 2023, 23:01

3 Korean universities rank in world's top 100

The main gate of Seoul National University in Gwanak District, southern Seoul. The university ranked 62nd for Times Higher Education's 2024 World University Rankings. [YONHAP]

Three Korean universities made it to the top 100 Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings for 2024 released on Wednesday.

Seoul National University (SNU), Yonsei University and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) are the three Korean universities that made it to the global top 100.

SNU ranked highest among Korean universities at 62nd, although falling from its previous year's rank of 56th.

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Yonsei University edged up to 76th from last year's 78th. KAIST ranked 83rd, moving up from 91st last year.

THE has been publishing its World University Rankings since 2004. The 2024 rankings announced Tuesday featured 1,904 institutions around the world.

Three additional Korean universities made it to the top 200.

Sungkyunkwan University ranked 145th, up from the previous year's 170th. Pohang University of Science and Technology ranked 149th, up from the previous year's 163rd place.

Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology narrowly made it to the top 200, ranking 199th. However, the university fell from its previous rank of 174th.

Korea University was placed in the 201 to 250 range, and Kyung Hee University and Sejong University were placed in the 251 to 300 range. The ranking doesn't assign a specific rank to universities that fall under 201st place globally. Instead, a broad range is assigned to indicate where they fall under.

The three universities' ranks didn't change from the previous year.

Two Korean universities made it to the list for the first time.

Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology debuted at the 351 to 400 range. Pukyong National University was put in the 1201 to 1500 range.

The methodology for this year's ranking has seen changes.

Among the five pillars — research environment, industry, research quality, teaching and international outlook — new metrics have been added to the research quality and industry pillars.

For the research quality pillar, the ranking used to only assess field-weighted citation impact, referring to the number of citations a university received compared to the overall average.

It now also considers "research strength" to assess how strong a university's research is, "research excellence" to determine how much of a university's research is considered to be in the top 10th percentile worldwide, and "research influence" to assess how much of a university's research is recognized worldwide.

For the industry pillar, THE now also looks into how often a university's research is cited in patents. Previously, it only considered how much income an institution generated through research grants.

With new areas introduced, the weights given to the teaching and the research environment pillars were reduced to 29.5 percent and 29 percent, respectively, from the previous 30 percent.

For the international outlook pillar, the study abroad metric, which looks into domestic students' international learning opportunities, is currently assigned a weight of zero percent. THE said it is in consideration of the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic made studying abroad difficult. The metric is expected to be given a bigger weight in the future.

According to THE, Korean universities outperformed the global average in the research excellence, research influence and patent metrics.

"The government has enacted significant changes to broadly boost the higher education sector and it will be very interesting to see how its Glocal initiative, which is intended to boost regional universities hit by the country's falling population, fairs up over the next few years," Phil Baty, chief global affairs officer at THE, said in a statement.

BY LEE TAE-HEE [lee.taehee2@joongang.co.kr]