Five students at South African universities have become the latest to benefit from the QS Scholarships Scheme, which is now ten years old.
The latest scholarships were awarded at the QS Maple conference, in Johannesburg, in the presence of more than 200 university leaders and academics from Africa, the Middle East and beyond. The recipients were selected on the basis of academic excellence and social engagement.
The five students will share $6,000 in scholarships to ensure that they can complete their courses. Bongekile Thembelihle Mncwabe Gundo is taking a degree in pharmacy and Gloria Thathalsa is training to be a doctor at the University of KwaZulu Natal, while Elana Smit is studying marketing management and Samantha Senosha is taking a BA in Community Development and Leadership at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). Jean-Jacques Monga KabokoJean, the only postgraduate, has embarked on a PhD in Engineering at UJ.
QS is believed to be the only ranking organization to have established a charitable foundation of this sort. Nunzio Quacquarelli, its founder and chief executive, said: ”QS Scholarship winners are united by demonstration of responsible leadership and community commitment, in very varied circumstances. QS is proud to give something back through its scholarship scheme and to help such outstanding young people.”
The QS Education Trust was established in 2003 and now has a scholarship fund worth over $1.2 million donated by the company and partner institutions. All delegate fees from QS Apple and QS Mapple conferences contribute to the scholarships scheme.
Over the past 10 years, more than 100 individuals from all over the world have benefited from funds donated by QS to support the IR studies at institutions that include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Columbia, Stanford, Cambridge, Luigi Bocconi University and University of Navarra. All have been selected by universities and business schools participating in the QS Scholarships Scheme.
A new leader emerged in the QS ranking of universities that are less than 50 years old. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), one of the youngest institutions of all, takes the accolade after moving up from third position last year’s inaugural ranking.
HKUST was already the leader in the QS Asian University Ranking, also published last week. Established only in 1991, it has shown its quality against much older institutions, rising seven places to 33rd in the overall global ranking for 2012.
The latest “Top 50 Under 50” ranking sees one Hong Kong university replace another at its head. Last year’s leader, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is now too old to qualify, having reached its half-century along with four others from the 2012 top 50. The universities of York, East Anglia and Victoria, and King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals are in the same position.
However, HKUST has overtaken the University of Warwick to reach the top. It is one of three universities from Hong Kong in the top ten.
Second-placed Nanyang Technological University is of the same vintage as HKUST, although another university had occupied the same site previously. The Singaporean institution has moved up from fourth place, having also entered the top 50 in the 2012 QS World University Rankings.
Partly because of the loss of the five 50-year-olds, 29 of the universities in the new ranking have moved up since last year. However, the progress made by these young institutions is genuine: those in the Under 50 ranking have, on average, risen 2.7 places in the global ranking in the last 12 months.
All 50 institutions in the new table fall within the top 350 in the QS World University Ranking, despite the advantages enjoyed by historic universities in such comparisons. The Hong Kong Baptist University, 27th this year, is the youngest at less than 20 years old.
By far the highest new entrant is the Hong Polytechnic University, in ninth place. It was omitted from last year’s inaugural ranking as an institution that was more than 50 years old, but it has since been accepted that university status arrived only in 1994. The University of Wollongong, in Australia, is in a similar position, having been omitted last year because it had been a division of the University of New South Wales until becoming a university in its own right in 1975.
The two cases illustrate the difficulty inherent in deciding whether universities that have evolved from other institutions should be considered less than 50 years old. The criteria employed in this ranking omit merged universities in which the dominant partner is more than 50 years old, but include those that were colleges before being granted university status.
The other new entrants are Argentina’s Universidad Austral, a private university based in Buenos Aires; Brunel University, in London; King Abdul Aziz University, in Jeddah; Universitá degli Studi di Roma – Tor Vergata; Linköping University, in Sweden; and Germany’s Universität Bremen. All have been moving up the overall world rankings, Linköping by more than 50 places in 2012.
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The annual Association for Institutional Research Conference kicked off in Long Beach California last week, with institutional researchers descending into the city to listen to topics ranging from domestic rankings, retention rates, and yield. As always the opening reception was themed, this year’s tropical theme was accompanied by steel drums, shell leis, and hyacinths. Although curiously, churros and performers on stilts were also part of the reception festivities, lending a surreal atmosphere to a room full of vendors.
This year highlights include a session on ‘Have the U.S. News Rankings Influenced the Choices of College-Bound Students?’ Speaker David Davis-Van Atta from Vassar College looked at the correlation between the year-on-year ranking of the top 25 liberal arts colleges against student application rates to see if a college went up in the rankings whether their application levels would also rise. Davis-Van Atta found that there was no correlation between the two however some observers during the Q&A session questioned his methodology including whether he should have looked at colleges beyond the top 25. Although the methodology used for the study might be limited, the analysis can lend to a healthy discussion on how students utilised rankings of universities, and whether institutions themselves give them more heed.
Meanwhile in the official U.S News session the following day featuring Bob Morse, it was standing-room.
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