Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and National University of Singapore (NUS) are named Asia's top two universities as per Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) global league table of top universities which was released on Wednesday, June 19 morning.
While NUS retained its rank from the last year's as the 11th university, NTU rose by one position and matched the scale to become the highest ranked universities in the Asia Pacific.
Global higher education consultancy QS said that recent ranking list, which is its 16th edition, "sees the prospect of a Singaporean university entering the world's top 10 increase with NTU's improvement"
NTU, which has been steadily climbing various global league tables as it continues to strive for excellence in education, achieved higher scores than NUS in faculty-to-student ratio and citations per faculty, an indicator of institutional research impact.
As per QS rankings, NTU's biggest improvements were in research citations per faculty, which moved up ten positions to 36th and employer reputation, which rose eight places to 35th. Its academic reputation climbed one place to 37th, while its international faculty ranking went up one place to 21st.
NUS received a score of 99.8 for academic reputation, based on responses from over 94,000 academics.
NTU and NUS stated that this result has shown their efforts in research and education are being recognised.
It should be noted that the Singapore Management University (SMU) also improved its position, as it climbed to 477th position from 500th last year.
These three Singaporean universities have scored full marks for international faculty ratio, which measures the proportion of non-local faculty at an institution.
However, compared to other global universities, NTU, NUS and SMU received lower scores for international student ratio.
After the rankings were released, an NUS spokesman said that it is an honour that many academics and employers all around the world continue to regard NUS "as among the best in Asia and globally... The remarkable global standing of our local universities attests to the quality of Singapore's higher education system."
An NTU spokesperson also stated that since the appointment of Professor Subra Suresh as president of the university in January 2018, the leadership team has overseen the hiring of the top talent in the past one and a half years.
As per QS World University Rankings, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University and Harvard University achieved top three places in the list.
Check which are the top 10 universities of the world:
