Some people take university rankings a little too seriously. Yesterday QS World University Rankings were revealed and six, yes six, Pakistani universities made into those coveted rankings. The universities that managed to rank among the top institutions around the world are Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), National University of Science and Technology (NUST), University of Karachi, University of Engineering and Technology (UET), University of Lahore and Quaid-e-Azam University.
Back in March, when Pakistani Higher Education Commission announced its own university rankings, students from LUMS and IBA whined for a good 3 months. One could not eat, play or even hang out in peace without one of the friends complaining about how unfair HEC’s ranking system was. “Come on, we’re so much better than Iqra,” some of them would say. While the Iqra peeps would say the same, now that they had HEC rankings to verify their statements. The word-wars kept going on, on and off until yesterday when the QS World University Ranking system released a new list. The LUMS kids were particularly ecstatic.
After all, the HEC ranking stung quite a lot:
So according to HEC Universities ranking of 2015, Iqra University is superior than IBA, LUMS and IoBM.
Masha Allah!
— Saquib Arshad (@SaqqiCFC) February 24, 2016
@yungdisillusion LUMS is not the best in Pakistan. Atleast not in any National or International ranking.
— Minhal (@Minhal512) June 14, 2016
Kon A hole hoga jo HEC ki ranking ko dekh ker szabist , lums , IBA ko chor k an embarrassment called IQRA may admission lay ga???? Kon ???
— UMAIRICA (@Umairmirza) February 23, 2016
However, one thing that most failed to take into account was that not even a single Pakistani university could make it to the top 500, just like the last year.
There wasn’t any considerable improvement in their rankings to begin with. For Pakistan, it was almost the same old rankings.
It must be noted that the universities are judged based on several criteria – 6 to be precise in this case – including academic reputation (40%), employer reputation (10%), faculty student ratio (20%), citations per faculty (20%), international students (5%), and international faculty (5%). Given the security situation Pakistan is currently in, having foreign or international students/faculty is almost improbable. Even though, most of the universities do have some international students, their number per university does not even exceed 10. Similarly, the universities offering art and social sciences programs are always a little behind in publications since such programs require a lot of time to come up with publishable contents as compared to the business and science schools. Does that mean the universities offering liberal arts or social sciences are doing nothing since we cannot really see them among the top universities of Pakistan? Absolutely, not.
While, the ranking systems are important to keep track of the general performance of a university, you cannot really put a tag on how more or less important a university is.
At the end of the day, it is all about getting intellectually challenged and forcing yourself out of the comfort zone. If your institution is playing a role in doing that, you really do not have to worry about its ranking on the QS or HEC ranking system.
Cover Image via: lps.lums.edu.pk