HSE Improves its Position by 90 Points on QS Ranking
Higher School of Economics (HSE) moved from the 501-550 to the 411-420 group on the QS World University Ranking for 2016/17.
According to the ranking’s authors, Russia is one of the countries showing outstanding results in this year’s ranking. The total number of universities that entered the ranking increased by one spot and reached 22, while 18 of them, including HSE, improved their positions.
HSE demonstrated positive dynamics for almost all indicators. This was possible thanks to the implementation of the university’s development strategy, including efforts in relation to the 5-100 Project.
The total number of HSE publications is also constantly growing, as does their quality, expressed in citations (in 2016, the total number of papers published by HSE researchers in international peer-reviewed journals and included in the ranking increased by 1.5 times).
Enrolment of international students also went up by 1.5 times. The total number of English-taught programmes, the number of students participating in international exchanges, and the total lecturers hired from the global labour market have also grown. This helped contribute to HSE’s improving internationalization indicators in the ranking.
HSE’s ‘Academic Reputation’ indicator also improved, and features the biggest share in the QS ranking, at 40%.
Almost all universities taking part in the 5-100 Project (13 of them appear on the ranking) improved their results, while also demonstrating positive dynamics with respect to their internationalization and reputations within the global academic community.
The top list of the annual QS World University Rankings for 2016/17 includes 916 universities (25 more than last year). Over 4,300 of the world’s universities were reviewed as candidates (compared to 3,800 in 2015).
In 2016, QS modernized its methods, hence university grades in the previous year’s ranking are formally not comparable with the current rankings.
Changes in the QS ranking methods include:
1. Indicators are now only normalized for the first 700 universities in each indicator;
2. The ranking does not account for publications considered ‘megacollaborative’ by QS. The extent of collaboration is determined specifically for each subject area. For example, ‘Physics and Astronomy’ does not include publications affiliated with over 59 organizations, while for ‘English Language’, the number of organizations cannot be over 4.