Tsinghua University now tops university rankings in Asia

Photo: Liping Yang/Wikimedia Commons

Peking University, however, drops two spots to fifth

Beijing's very own Tsinghua University has knocked the National University of Singapore (NUS) off the top perch in the Times Higher Education's (THE) 2019 Asian University Rankings. THE, which has been ranking universities all over the world for the past five decades, noted that Tsinghua's increased scores for teaching environment, industry income and research helped pushed NUS, which has occupied the top spot since 2016, down to second place. 

THE's 2019 Asia rankings assessed an expanded list of 400 universities, up from 350 last year, in 27 countries and regions. It uses 13 performance indicators adapted to Asia's institutions, with research productivity, research income and industry income having more of an impact on scores. 

This is the first time that a university in Mainland China has taken top honours in the London-based magazine's Asia rankings. Meanwhile, Peking University dropped to fifth place while the University of Hong Kong holds steady at fourth. 26 other Mainland Chinese universities placed in the Top 100, including Zhejiang University (14th), Fudan University (17th), Nanjing University (18th) and Shanghai Jiaotong University (24th).

On THE's 2019 World University Rankings, which uses a different metric and assesses a pool of over 1,250 institutes of higher learning, Tsinghua University comes in at 22nd, overtaking Peking University at 31st for the first time in the global listing's history. 

THE attributes the rise of Chinese university rankings to improvement in the citation impact metric, with data also showing that its average teaching reputation scores are now on par with the best higher education institutions in the UK and Germany.

Top 10 Universities in Asia 2019 
1 Tsinghua University 
2 National University of Singapore 
3 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 
4 University of Hong Kong 
5 Peking University 
6 Nanyang Technological University of Singapore
7 Chinese University of Hong Kong 
8 The University of Tokyo 
9 Seoul National University 
10 Sungkyunkwan University

Top 10 Universities in the World 2019

1 University of Oxford

2 University of Cambridge

3 Stanford University

4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

5 California Institute of Technology

6 Harvard University

7 Princeton University

8 Yale University

9 Imperial College London

10 University of Chicago

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