Indian Higher Educational Institutes once again failed

India’s higher educational institutions have once again failed to find a respectable place in the world’s top 500 universities.

Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is the only institution that figures somewhere between 300 and 400 as ranked by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) for 2013.

American universities have captured 17 positions of the top 20 slots, with two going to the British universities and one being occupied by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich. Of the 500 universities ranked, American universities captured a total of 182 slots; European universities occupied 200 slots — but only three made the top 20. As many as 17 Chinese universities were included as well.

Harvard University has been described as the world’s best university with a score of 100; followed by Stanford University with a score of 72.6. University of California, Berkeley; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and University of Cambridge have scored around 71 points.

The IISc has just about held on to its last year’s slot but improved its performance in the Departments of Chemistry and Computer Science. In the former, the Institute has jumped two ranks from 45 in 2012 to 43 this year and in the latter from a range of 101-150 in the past to 51-75 in 2013.

In Natural Science and Mathematics, and Engineering Technology and Computer Science, the score remains stagnant, ranging between 151-200 and 76-100 respectively.

ARWU, also known as Shanghai Rankings, considers every university that has any Nobel Laureates, field medallists, highly cited researchers, or papers published in Nature or Science. In addition, universities with significant amount of papers indexed by the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) are also included. In total, more than 1000 universities are actually ranked, and the best 500 are published on the web.

Universities are also ranked by several indicators of academic or research performance, and the per capita academic performance of an institution. For each indicator, the highest scoring institution is assigned a score of 100, and other institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top score.