KTH continues to rank high on THE list
In the prestigious Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, which were published last week, KTH Royal Institute of Technology was listed as 126th best university in the world –compared with its standing last year at 117th. Yet KTH was ranked as the world’s 30th best university for engineering and technology.
“The results show that KTH has established itself among the 110-130 foremost universities in the world,” says KTH’s rankings expert Per-Anders Östling. “KTH continues to perform well in terms of research, education and collaboration, despite being ranked nine places lower than last year.”
“However, there is potential for improvement with regard to the field normalised citation rate, where KTH performed weakly in comparison to other leading technical universities,” Östling says.
KTH retained roughly the same scores as in the previous year’s survey, even if the field normalised citation rate decreased somewhat.
KTH performs particularly well in the Industry Income performance indicator, which takes stock of cooperation, knowledge transfer and the value businesses place on the universities’ research. KTH scores at the very top in this indicator.
Other high scores were given on staffing ratio and the degree of co-publication. KTH earned very high ratings on the number of articles per faculty and researchers.
By contrast, the number of international students dropped since the previous survey, although the degree of internationalisation remains at a very high level.
The ranking has a great impact on such areas as recruitment of students and researchers, alumni employability, and possibilities for cooperation with other world-leading universities and multinational businesses. It also affects the universities’ ability to compete internationally for external research funding, as well as in investment in excellence.
The rankings even impact on policy in Sweden and are often used in public debate.
Of a total of some 20,000 universities and educational institutions in the world, 400 are ranked by THE. The list is seen as the most important and prestigious ranking, and is based on a comprehensive, multi-faceted measurement.
The top 200 universities are further graded individually on a variety of criteria and indicators, including measures of citations of scientific papers, the degree of internationalisation and the university's reputation for research and education.
KTH is placed just above the 100 mark on the two leading rankings THE and QS .
Jill Klackenberg