In the history of rankings, Russian universities have never before been in the top dozen of such prestigious charts.
On Thursday, March 4, Quacquarelli Symonds, which along with THE and ARWU is one of the three most respected agencies involved in grading higher education institutions, released the results of the updated rankings for 51 subjects. St. Petersburg Mining University is ranked 12th in the Engineering - Mineral & Mining discipline, improving its last year’s achievement by six positions in one go.
Such pillars of mining education as Colorado High School (USA), McGill University (Canada) and Queensland University (Australia) traditionally became leaders in this category. MISIS, which traditionally occupies a high position here, this year ranked 42nd (in 2020 it ranked 46th).
A total of 1,453 educational institutions were ranked by QS, 85 more than in 2020. 588 of them are represented in the Engineering - Mineral & Mining chart. This subject ranking includes universities whose areas of study are related to the training of specialists for oil and gas, mining, exploration companies, as well as environmentalists who are engaged in minimizing environmental pollution by specialized enterprises.
Mining University has been in the top 20 of QS subject rankings for the fifth year in a row, but previously it ranked from 16th to 19th. This year’s leap forward was primarily due to the increased publication activity of the St. Petersburg university’s scientists. The points awarded by Quacquarelli Symonds for the citation rate of their scientific articles increased from 47 in 2020 to 67. At the same time, other indicators, in particular the opinion of the academic community and employers, remained at the previous, very high level.
“Global rankings always carry an element of subjectivity because one can only compare a medical school to a theater school or a technical school to a liberal arts school if one of them is in decline and the other is flourishing. If, however, all of these institutions are distinguished by a high-quality educational environment, then any attempts at analogy become highly questionable. So, in essence, we are asking who is the best professional: a doctor or an actor, a rig supervisor or a journalist? To put it bluntly, the very formulation of the question is incorrect. The subject rankings are a competition between specialized universities with similar goals. That’s why the stability of our ranking among the world’s twenty best mining universities according to QS is especially important to us,” commented the results of the ranking the rector of St. Petersburg Mining University Vladimir Litvinenko.
He also emphasized that based on the results of the QS experts’ survey of employers Mining University gets more than 90 points out of 100 possible each year. This shows a high level of trust in the university on the part of the business and the demand for its graduates at the enterprises that are cornerstones of the Russian economy.
“This year, even though the competition in our discipline has seriously increased, we have made another step up. This is by no means a goal in and of itself, but such a high ranking by a reputable ranking agency is of course very important for us. It reflects the development vector of the University and shows that we are moving in the right direction,” summed up Litvinenko.
Note that when compiling subject rankings QS uses four indicators: opinion of academic community and employers as well as citation index and Hirsch index, calculated based on bibliometrics. At the same time, the proportion of one or another indicator for each of the 51 directions is different. In the “Engineering - mining and mining industry” discipline the priority is the opinion of the heads of specialized companies and organizations.
