A glimmer of hope from college rankings

Chung Un-chan
The author, a former prime minister and former president of Seoul National University, is the chairman of the Korea Institute for Shared Growth.

Korea is under a gloomy spell. We are forced to witness ghastly episodes of the opposition party abusing its majority power, the impotency of governing party members and profane verbal attacks from both sides of the aisle. The economy is depressed while social problems are worsening. The country became vastly and deeply bisected, hardening communications among communities, friends and even family members.

A string of uplifting news from overseas provides some comfort. According to the World University Rankings 2025 released by British rating agency QS on the largest-ever pool of candidates — 5,663 universities from 106 countries — five names from Korea made the top 100 list. The bulk of the top 100 were from English-speaking countries — 25 from the United States, 15 from the United Kingdom and nine from Australia. China, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea each had five universities on the list, the most from non-English countries. Japan had four universities in the list, and Seoul National University (SNU) ranked 31st, above the University of Tokyo at 32nd for the first time.

The QS ranking is not without flaws. It is weighted by academic reputation (30 percent), citations per faculty (20 percent), employer reputation of graduates (15 percent), faculty-student ratio (10 percent), international faculty ratio (5 percent), international student ratio (5 percent), international research network (5 percent), employment outcomes (5 percent) and sustainability (5 percent).

Can these measurements truly reflect the superiority of a university institution? The numerical ranking relies half of its assessment on non-numerical observations and information like the reputation of an institution. The assessments of an institution and its graduates rely on surveys in English completed mostly by anonymous English-speaking people.

The top four universities, 20 in the top 50 and 40 in the top 100 list are located in the UK or the U.S., implying an inevitable bias towards English-speaking countries. The British pitch on the QS ranking raises suspicions of the list marketing English-speaking tertiary education.

Universities should not be swayed by rankings. Professors have been under fire for neglecting lectures and student education to concentrate on upping their publication and citation counts. The competition for foreign students has been suspected to stem from wanting to improve international rankings. The goal of universities should be setting values and sharing the wisdom of humanity to improve people’s lives.

Still, the QS rating gives hope to domestic universities. No Korean names were included in the top 100 list by Times Higher Education that suddenly began to rate universities at the turn of the century. SNU and other top Korean universities have been sneered as frogs in the well. SNU dispatched its international cooperation director Noh Kyung-soo to London to find out the reason why. The organization answered that Korean universities were not cooperative on offering data for its assessment. SNU’s ranking went up to 63rd in 2006 and 51st in 2011 after the school faithfully complied with presenting assessment materials.

Some U.S. universities refused to be rated, suspecting that Chinese professors intentionally cited each another to boost the rankings of Chinese institutions. Still, SNU’s ascent above its Tokyo counterpart — and the five Korean names in the top 100 versus Japan’s four — should be regarded as a meaningful feat similar to Korea winning the gold medal in baseball at the 2008 Beijing Olympics after beating Japan in the finals.

The Education Ministry announced that Korea came 2nd among 64 countries in the creative thinking category of the OECD Program for International Student Assessment. The latest test on 15-year-olds did not include the U.S., Japan, the UK, Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, Austria and Luxemburg. Singapore came in first place, and second place was shared by Korea and Canada, followed by Australia and New Zealand.

In the 2024 World Competitiveness ranking compiled by Switzerland-based IMD Business School, Korea moved up 8 notches to rank at No. 20 among 67 countries. Among the seven “50-30” economies with a population of more than 50 million and a per capita income of more than $30,000, Korea was No. 2 after the U.S. Both rankings are the highest-ever for Korea, said the Ministry of Economy and Finance. The objectivity of these measurements can be questioned, but the results shed light on hope. We hope the ascension of Korean universities and society can help shake the country out of the blues.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.