Islamabad's National University of Science and Technology (NUST) has been listed among the top 100 universities in the BRICS & Emerging Economies Rankings 2015, published by The Times Higher Education (THE).

THE, a leading UK-based magazine, published the 2015 THE World Reputation Rankings – the leading list of the world’s 100 most prestigious universities, based on the largest invitation-only survey of senior academics across the world.

The list includes the top 100 universities of the world, 100 Asian universities and 100 universities from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and emerging economies.

Read: NUST unveils Pakistan’s fastest super computer

NUST is the only Pakistani university featured in the latest rankings.

Harvard University retained first place on the list of the world’s most prestigious universities while Japan leads Asia in the global reputation league, but the University of Tokyo falls still further from the top ten.

There is outstanding progress for China’s leading universities – with Tsinghua and Peking securing their highest ever positions – but Hong Kong lost ground.

The UK’s Cambridge University (2nd) and Oxford (3rd) push the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (4th) and Stanford University (5th) down.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2014-2015 list the best global universities. The magazine says these are the only international university performance tables to judge world-class universities across all of their core missions - teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

The top universities rankings employ 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available, which are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.

Among the 100 top ranking universities, India, Iran, China and Saudi Arabia have their share.

Where do Pakistani universities stand among the world institutions?

Phil Baty, editor of Times Higher Education Rankings, answers: “I can reveal that several Pakistani universities were named as being among the best by our survey respondents, including University of Karachi, University of Punjab and Quaid-I-Azam,” said Phil Baty in an email interview to Dawn.com.

“However, none of them received enough nominations to make the highly prestigious top 100 group – which represents no more than about 0.5 per cent of the world’s higher education institutions.”

The magazine only releases the top 100 universities on this particular ranking – as it judges universities based entirely on how they are perceived and respected by 10,000 senior scholars from around the world and the data differentials become very slight deeper down the list.

As most of the universities are ranked on their perceived reputation, what should Pakistani universities do?

When asked if interaction with international universities and siging MoU would help, Phil Baty said: “As long as the MoU documents translate into real action – genuine research partnerships and exchanges of faculty and of ideas – they should really help Pakistan. Not only do such international collaborations help to ensure that academics learn from one another and share best practices from across the globe, which drives up standards, they also ensure that the important work being done by Pakistani universities will be better understood by international scholars, and better recognised. Too often, however, MoU’s are signed and they sit in a filing cabinet without being acted upon. True global partnerships and collaborations are highly effective and good for the whole of higher education.”

How can Pakistani universities improve their rankings?

“This study is based entirely on a survey of academic opinion, where leading scholars around the world name which institutions are strongest in teaching and research. There is no way of knowing why these academics are not nominating Pakistani institutions enough."

"However, many of the institutions which do not feature in the World Reputation Rankings also receive poor scores for international outlook in the Times Higher Education’s main World University Rankings, published in October (which are based on 13 performance criteria). This means that they are not attracting enough international students or staff, collaborating with overseas universities enough, or publishing enough research papers in English – the global language."

“All of these factors can influence a university’s reputation, so it is likely that by improving their international outlook Pakistani institutions can not only improve through sharing best practice globally and drawing on the global talent pool, they can also improve how they are perceived by the global academic community, as they will be much better placed to property demonstrate to the world their particular strengths. Ultimately the only way to improve in the world reputation rankings is to ensure that scholars across the world recognise you as an excellent teaching and research institution.”

As higher education is a serious business, universities do a lot of work to improve and retain their reputation and of course work.

For the fifth year in a row, the 2015 rankings have highlighted an elite group of six US and UK “super-brands” that stands head and shoulders above the rest, headed by Harvard University. Cambridge University moves into second place this year (up from 4th), Oxford University takes third (up from 5th), while the Massachusetts Institute of Technology drops to fourth (from second) and Stanford University takes 5th (from 3rd). The University of California, Berkeley, holds onto 6th place.

Overall, the US continues to dominate, with 26 of the top 50 places, and a total of 43 of the top 100 (down from 46 last year). After the US, the UK has the most top 100 representatives: 12, up from ten last year and nine in 2013.

In the Asia-Pacific region, Australia gained ground. Its leader, the University of Melbourne, host of the THE World Academic Summit in October 2015, moved up from 43rd to joint 41st. Both the University of Sydney and Australian National University moved up from the 61-70 band to the 51-60 group.

Asia’s number one performer is the University of Tokyo, slipping one place to 12th in the world. But it was a bad result overall for Japan, as Kyoto University slipped out of the top 20, from 19th to 27th, and Osaka University fell out of the table altogether.

The World Reputation Rankings are part of the portfolio of league tables that has established Times Higher Education as the most respected provider of comparative global higher education performance data.

They are based on a global invitation-only opinion poll carried out in partnership with Elsevier.

The poll has attracted almost 70,000 responses from more than 150 countries in five annual rounds since the first survey in 2010. The 2015 results were drawn from 10,507 survey responses from published senior academics who reported an average of 15 years working in higher education.