The oldest technical university in Russia took the sixth place in the international rating of the British agency QS.
On Wednesday, April 10, it became known that Empress Catherine II Saint Petersburg Petersburg Mining University for the eighth time in a row entered the top 20 of the World University Ranking by Subject in the direction of "Mineral & Mining Engineering" (Mineral & Mining Engineering).This year it took the sixth place in the world, in the first half-dozen also three Australian universities, Colorado School of Mines and Canadian McGill University.
The British company Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), which along with THE and ARWU is one of the three most prestigious international agencies engaged in grading universities, conducts a new ranking every spring. This year its experts analyzed the success of 4,989 higher education institutions from 149 countries. At the same time, no other domestic university made it to the top ten in any of the nominations. Only Lomonosov Moscow State University managed to take a place in the top 20, which became 19th in the category "Linguistics".
As for "Mineral & Mining Engineering", the St. Petersburg university overtook such status educational institutions as the Canadian University of Alberta (12th place), Chinese University of Mining Engineering and Technology (21st), Freiberg Mining Academy from Germany (22nd).
Rector Vladimir Litvinenko, commenting on the results of the QS-2024 subject ranking, called them "natural". He noted that despite the cooling of relations with the West, the international academic community does not question the high status of Mining University, although in general the positions of our universities have weakened somewhat for objective reasons.
"If you look at the criteria by which higher education institutions are evaluated, and there are four of them in total, we are in second place in the world in terms of such indicator as "academic reputation" (85.3 points, higher only than the Colorado Mining School - ed.). This shows that our partners, no matter what countries they represent, understand perfectly well: our university has created a comfortable scientific and educational environment, which gives students, teachers and scientists an opportunity for self-realization," said Vladimir Litvinenko.
He also noted that no rating, even such an authoritative one, can be an end in itself. At the same time, it is "a public mirror, which allows us to look at ourselves from the outside, to assess the path we have traveled and mobilize efforts in those areas where there are certain gaps." The main of them, according to the rector, is the loss of continuity in the ideology of education, which a priori should be oriented to the solution of the most important state task - the training of specialists for production, scientists and teachers of the highest category.
"Our President Vladimir Putin has clearly defined and voiced the fundamental ideology in the field of education. Our mission is to put it into practice through a pilot project to improve higher education, which is now being implemented at Mining University. The basis of the methodological approach is the purposeful harmonious activity of a teacher and a student, which leads to the creation of a "tuning fork" for tuning the entire scientific and pedagogical staff to train a specialist, oriented to self-realization in the real sector of the economy and in science, as well as to continuous personal growth. The subject of the goal is the teacher-mentor, the object is the person being educated", - explained Vladimir Litvinenko.
He also assured that Mining University will continue to work on creating conditions for the realization of creative opportunities of teachers, who create a new combination of different components of the educational process, which positively affects the dynamics of students' development and stimulates their interest in gaining knowledge.