IISc - Times Higher Education Ranking

Why in news?

In rankings released by Times Higher Education (THE), The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru was placed No. 8 in the list of the World’s Best Small Universities.

What is IISc?

• Indian Institute of Science (IISc) also known as the Tata Institute, is a public university for scientific research and higher education located in Bangalore, India.
• It was established in 1909 with support from Jamsetji Tata and the Maharaja of Mysore.

What are IISc’s achievements so far?

• This is not the first time that the Bengaluru-based institute has done well in an international survey.
• At present, it is in the 201-250 band globally and it is edging closer to the top 200.
• In 2015, it made it to the list of top 100 engineering universities worldwide and was among the top 30 Asian universities in 2016.
• This ranking is the result of over 100 years of hard work, a high quality faculty, independence given to researchers and government support.

On what basis the university rankings is done?

• The world university rankings are based on marks allotted under five key areas — teaching, research, citations, industry income and international outlook — with a maximum of 100 marks in each category and for overall performance.
• Universities in Singapore are among the best in the world on all five counts, while Indian universities tend to be weak on scores for citations and international outlook.
• Caltech is No. 2 in the world rankings and No. 1 in the small universities rankings.
• It had an overall score of 94.3, with 99.8 for citations, 90.8 for industry income, 63.4 for international outlook, 95.7 for research, and 95.9 for teaching.
• Caltech’s teacher-student ratio is 6.7. It has 27% foreign students.
• IISc scored 47.3 for citations, 48 for industry income, 18.1 for international outlook, 49.2 for research, and 50.1 for teaching. IISc has 8.3 student-teacher ratio and only 1% foreign students.
• To qualify for the Best Small Universities list, institutions had to feature in THE’s overall World University Rankings for 2016-17.
• It had to be teaching more than 4 subjects and it  has to have less than 5,000 students.

Why Indian universities perform poorly?

• Global surveys and pedagogic principles recognise that more faculty per student makes for an institution with an engaged and interactive teaching environment.
• The overall faculty-student ratio in India is 1:27. This itself is a good indicator of the poor performance of Indian universities.
• Also, India often treats universities like another government department or at times, even the government’s handmaiden.
• For example, last year, universities in Gujarat were issued a list of “preferred” topics for doctoral research by the state government.

Source: The Indian Express