NUS and NTU take joint 11th place in latest QS university rankings

SINGAPORE — The National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have claimed joint 11th placing in the latest edition of the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings.

The 2020 edition of the QS rankings, which ranks the world's top 1,000 universities, was released on Wednesday (June 19).

NUS maintained its 2019 position at 11th, while NTU jumped one spot up from 12th last year. This makes them both the best-placed Asian universities in the latest rankings, with China's Tsinghua University joining them in the top 20.

An NUS spokesperson said in a statement: “The remarkable global standing of our local universities attests to the quality of Singapore’s higher education system.” 

In its press release, QS said that NUS has a better reputation than NTU among academics and employers. On the other hand, NTU has the edge in terms of its smaller class sizes and larger research impact.

Mr Ben Sowter, director of research at QS, said: “Singapore’s top two universities are a model for higher education excellence: High academic standards, a highly international outlook, and small classes designed to facilitate the sort of teaching that creates highly employable critical thinkers.” 

Mr Sowter also pointed out that both NUS and NTU received lower scores this year for their faculty-to-student ratios and international student ratios.

“Efforts must be made to ensure that the state’s universities do not suffer the same teaching capacity pressures as their European and Australian peers,” he cautioned.

In a statement, NTU said that its new leadership team under its fourth president, Professor Subra Suresh, has overseen the hiring of top talent over the past year-and-a-half.

NTU added that its Presidential Post-doctoral Fellows programme, launched in 2018, attracted applications for 12 positions this year, from nearly 900 young people from top institutions around the world.

Singapore Management University was the only other Singapore university to feature in the rankings. It ranked 477th, moving up 23 places from its previous ranking of 500th last year.

The 2020 QS World University Rankings surveyed more than 94,000 academics and 44,000 employers to rank the world’s top universities from 82 countries.

Six performance indicators — academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, faculty-to-student ratio, and the proportions of international faculty and international students — were used in the assessment.