The universally renowned Quacquarelli Symonds recently unveiled their “QS University Rankings: Asia 2016” – a dedicated ranking of the top universities in Asia. According to these rankings, LUMS has emerged as Pakistan’s best university with NUST as a close second.
This year’s list which ranks 350 of Asia’s top universities, unfortunately, did not see any of the Pakistani universities breaking into the top 100. LUMS has been ranked at 111, coming up 50 places from last year. LUMS has now taken the spot which was previously held by Quaid-e-Azam University of being Pakistan’s best university.
Just behind LUMS is NUST. Ranked at 112, it has come up 5 places from last year’s 119th spot. Quaid-e-Azam University fell in ranking to the 149th spot. PIEAS, which once used to be Pakistan’s top university, is now ranked at 149 too. Aga Khan is at 183, while the University of Karachi lies in the 201-210 band.
The drastic contrast between this year’s and last year’s ranking can be attributed to improvements in the performance measuring metrics used by QS. Nonetheless, whatever the ranking maybe, Pakistani universities still have a long way to go. QS Ranking has also previously regarded Pakistan’s higher education system the worst in the world. This only further proves the point that there is still a lot to be done.
The top spots in this year’s ranking were taken by National University of Singapore, University of Hong Kong and Nanyang Technological University. Indian Universities also performed exceedingly well according to the new rankings, with several universities making it to the top 100.
