Why in News?

• The Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Subject Rankings 2020 has been released recently by Quacquarelli Symonds (London). Quacquarelli Symonds is the world’s leading provider of services, analytics, and insight to the global higher education sector.

About the Rankings:

• QS uses four key metrics to compile the rankings including academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per paper and the h-index which measures how productive an institution’s research faculty are.
• 1,368 institutions have been ranked across 48 subjects in 5 broad categories across 159 locations.
• Top Rankers: Globally, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT – USA) emerged as the world’s best-performing institution, achieving 12 number-one positions, followed by Harvard University (USA) with 11 number-one positions and University of Oxford (United Kingdom) with eight top ranked subjects.

India’s Performance as per the Index:

• The 2020 edition of the QS World University Subject Rankings has ranked as many as 26 departments of higher education institutions in India among the top 100 in the world in their respective subject category.
• As against 21 institutions getting ranked in 2019, the latest edition has seen 26 Indian departments entering the top-100 list for their subjects. All 26 departments are in institutions run by the Union government — IITs, IIMs, IISc and Delhi University.
• In terms of institutes and subjects, India’s highest-ranked programs included Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay’s Mineral & Mining Engineering program at 41st rank globally, shared jointly with the University of Delhi’s Development Studies program.
• IIT Bombay emerged with more top-100 ranks than any other Indian university in QS World University Rankings by Subject 2020.