THE's Korean university rankings 2015~216



The Time's Higher Education supplement has released their yearly world rankings of universities. This information is very easy to find at their website. I just felt like making it simple by just taking the rankings for just Korean universities and sticking them in a simple table. That is literally all I did here.

Pretty fascinating to see that the SKY monopoly (triopoly?) is essentially intact, but spaced out by industry-supported schools focusing on science, technology, and engineering; Korea's export bread-and-butter. I suspect that has to do with the financial backing they have from conglomerates, and the volume of scientific academic journal citations, both of which were factors in the rankings. Seriously, I set-up an alert on Google Scholar and got so many medical/chemical hits, I had to shut off to stop flooding my inbox. Here's the bit on Industry Income as a factor of methodology:

A university’s ability to help industry with innovations, inventions and consultancy has become a core mission of the contemporary global academy. This category seeks to capture such knowledge-transfer activity by looking at how much research income an institution earns from industry (adjusted for PPP), scaled against the number of academic staff it employs.
The category suggests the extent to which businesses are willing to pay for research and a university’s ability to attract funding in the commercial marketplace – useful indicators of institutional quality. [THE]

If you want my two cents on that, I'd say it's actually a very useful factor to measure by. Private companies have their bottom lines to consider, and likely wouldn't pour funding into schools that don't churn out practical, useful, marketable materials/processes, unlike say government-sponsored public schools or wealthy alumni-funded private schools, which might have different agendas. But what the hell do I know. 

Anyway, here's the list:


World RankingName
85Seoul National University
116Pohang University of Science and Technology
148Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
153Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU)
251-300Korea University
301-350Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology
301-350Yonsei University
351-400Hanyang University
401-500Ewha Womans University
401-500Kyung Hee University
401-500University of Ulsan
501-600Chung-Ang University
501-600Pusan National University
601-800Ajou University
601-800Chonbuk National University
601-800Chonnam National University
601-800Chungnam National University
601-800Inha University
601-800Konkuk University
601-800Kyungpook National University
601-800Sejong University
601-800University of Seoul
601-800Sogang University
601-800Yeungnam University 

It looks like below 200, they start grouping the rankings, so you'll have to click-through to see how each one fared. Even though the "Overall ranking has been withheld" on these grouped-rankings, you can get some idea of relative comparison by seeing THE's page on each individual school itself.


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