JNU, DU among top 500 humanities varsities in the world: Times global rankings

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Not a single Indian university featured in the top 300 of the world’s best, and only two — Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Delhi University (DU) – found a place in the top 500 in the latest Times Higher Education rankings of institutions in arts and humanities.

The survey by the London-based agency again demonstrates how heavily dependant the Indian education system is on technical institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, to take it higher up the global rankings.

With the latest Times Higher Education rankings restricted to the arts and humanities subjects, Indian universities failed to find a place in the top rungs of institutions that were predictably dominated by those from the United States, which grabbed seven of the top 10 positions.

Stanford University ranked first, followed by the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford, the oldest institutions from England. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, which both offer programmes in humanities, rounded off the top five. UCL, formerly University College London, ranked sixth followed by the universities of Princeton, Chicago, Yale and California.

JNU found a place in the 301 to 400 bracket and DU in the 401-500 bracket. There was no other Indian institution in the 535 universities ranked.

If there is a silver lining, it is that no Indian institution figured in the rankings for the last two years. The number of universities ranked in the 2018 and 2019 editions of the survey were 400 and 506 respectively; the number increased to 536 this in the 2020edition.

The human resource development ministry has been trying to improve the global rankings of Indian institutions through its Institutes of Eminence (IoE) programme, which would entitle selected universities to greater autonomy, allowing them to admit foreign students and recruit faculty from abroad. JNU does not find a place in the 10 public institutions that are being groomed under the IoE scheme.

One of the key parameters on which Indian institutions have consistently faltered in global rankings is in the internationalization of their campuses. In this latest rankings list, while Stanford has 23 % international students and Cambridge and Oxford have 37% and 41 % respectively, the comparable figure for DU and JNU is just 1 % 4%.

No Asian universities appear in the top 20 of the rankings, but China now has three institutions in the top 100 for the first time, led by Peking University in the 23rd position. Overall, eight Asian universities are ranked in the top 100.