Rice among world’s top 40 universities for physical sciences, engineering and IT

Rice University is ranked among the world’s top 40 universities for both physical sciences and engineering/IT in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2014-15.

In the new rankings published Oct. 1, Rice is tied with Germany’s Georg-August-Universität Göttingen for No. 32 in the subject physical sciences. For the subjects engineering and IT, Rice is No. 40.

On the list of the top 100 universities overall, Rice is ranked No. 69; among universities in North America, it ranks No. 37. Caltech is No. 1 on both of those lists. Last year Rice was No. 65 among world universities.

Times Higher Education, a London-based magazine, uses five main areas to compare universities’ performance:

* Teaching (30 percent of score) — an assessment of the teaching and learning environment from both the student and academic perspectives, including an academic reputation survey and a staff-to-student ratio.

* Research (30 percent of score) — the university’s reputation for research excellence among its peers, research income and the volume of papers published in academic journals.

* Citations (30 percent of score) — the number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally.

* Industry income (2.5 percent of score) — the university’s ability to help industry with innovations, inventions and consultancy, including how much research income an institution earns from industry.

* International outlook (7.5 percent of score) — diversity on campus and the degree to which academics collaborate with international colleagues on research projects.

Among these five categories, Rice fared best for citations, with a score of 99.9. Its second highest score was for international outlook – 70.8. Rice’s overall score was 59.8.

To view the complete rankings, go to
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/.