University of Tokyo ranked as Asia’s best

University of Tokyo ranked as Asia's best
Graduates from Asia's best school. Source: Shutterstock.

Japan’s University of Tokyo defends its title as the top university in Asia, despite falling from its 20th spot last year to the 24th spot this year.

The 140-year-old institution marked another year of positive performance in the Academic Ranking of World Universities 2017 (ARWU 2017) by Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, where it has consistently been among the world’s top 25 since 2003. Harvard University retained its number one spot for the 15th year running.

According to Dr Snow Wang, the ranking manager for Shanghai Ranking, University of Tokyo owes its stellar showing to its strong performance in all indicators.

“Tokyo University has the largest number of alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals and the highest Nature and Science publications among universities in Asia. The university also has strong performance in other indicators,” Wang told Study International News.

The ARWU ranking uses a set of objective indicators and third-party data to rank about 1300 universities worldwide, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of Highly Cited Researchers, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance.

Overall, Asia increased its share of universities in the top 500 although the United States continues to dominate, with 48 top 100 universities and 135 top 500 universities.

Other Asian universities that did well were Japan’s Kyoto University (35th) and China’s Tsinghua University (48th), who managed to enter the top 50 for the first time.

Nanyang Technological University. Source: Shutterstock.

While Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University is the highest-ranked university in Asia for engineering, its rival the National University of Singapore performed better overall and is the only Southeast Asian university to break into the top 100.

Singapore’s oldest institution for higher education came in at joint 91st with the University of Western Australia.

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