ENAC jumps up the QS World University Rankings over the past 5 years
At EPFL, ENAC is not the only one to appear in the top-10 of the QS Ranking. © Alain Herzog /EPFL
In all three of its research areas – civil engineering, architecture and environmental sciences – ENAC has risen in the prestigious QS World University Rankings over the past five years. Let’s have a closer look.
From 2015 to 2020, ENAC jumped up the prestigious QS World University Rankings thanks to the school’s solid reputation in each of its three research areas. The numbers speak for themselves: ENAC went from 21st to 8th place in civil engineering, from 24th to 10th place in architecture and from 48th to 25th place in environmental sciences. Why accounts for these strong results? Was it because of the hard work put in by the ENAC research institutes’ management teams in recent years?
The QS World University Rankings by Subject cover a total of 200 universities. So given the fierce competition around the globe, even making it onto the scoreboard is a big deal. The ranking is based on four indicators: employer reputation; academic reputation, based on a peer review; the number of citations per paper; and a citation score based on the h-index.
These indicators are weighted differently for each subject. ENAC’s solid ranking for civil engineering was driven by two indicators: employer reputation, which accounts for 30% of the score, and academic reputation, which makes up 40%. The other two categories each have a 15% weighting. Architecture owes its top ten spot primarily to its excellent international academic reputation, which has a 70% weighting in the final score, while each of the other three categories makes up 10%. Lastly, environmental sciences scored well in terms of its academic reputation (40% weighting) and citations, with each of the two citations indicators accounting for 25%. Employer reputation has a 10% weighting for this subject.
No two rankings have the same methodology
“It’s one of the most prestigious rankings in the world, so we’re very pleased,” says Alexander Nebel, who’s in charge of ranking analysis at EPFL. “However, these figures reflect short-term trends and can easily change. Another ranking that’s just as prestigious, such as the Shanghai Academic Ranking, can produce very different results.” That’s because each ranking uses its own methodology. While MIT earned the top civil engineering spot in the QS Ranking in 2020, it came in between 76th and 100th place in the Shanghai Ranking. And for EPFL, civil engineering went from 8th in the QS Ranking in 2020 to 16th place in the Shanghai Ranking. This is because the citation indicators aren’t the same in the Shanghai Ranking, international collaborations and prestigious awards – such as the Nobel Prize and the Fields Medal – are taken into account, and the total number of universities included in the ranking is 300 not 200.
EPFL at the top
ENAC’s research areas are not the only subjects in which EPFL made the top ten in the 2020 QS Ranking. EPFL ranked 7th for materials engineering, 8th for computer science and for chemical engineering, and 9th for electrical and electronic engineering.
Interview with Michel Bierlaire, the director of ENAC’s Institute of Civil Engineering:
Why did ENAC do so well?
We have exceptionally talented professors and researchers in every unit and laboratory. They all share a common goal, and that’s academic excellence in all areas – research, teaching and outreach. And their expertise is complementary, which makes for high-value-added partnerships.
Do these rankings help EPFL hire talented people?
It’s hard to say. But when you ask applicants why they want to work at EPFL during job interviews, a lot of them do mention EPFL’s reputation. The rankings can also have a big impact in terms of attracting foreign students, because it means our School is included in the list of universities that good foreign students look at for their Master’s or PhDs.
What role do you think rankings should play?
They’re an indicator. And like any indicator, they don’t tell the whole story and can be random in some ways. Their worth changes depending on the criteria used and the weighting given to those criteria. Looking at just one ranking at one given moment doesn’t tell you very much. But analyzing trends over time can be instructive, and it shows the very high level of academic work being done in Switzerland, at EPFL and at ENAC. In civil engineering in particular, over the past five years we have improved our score for all four of the indicators used in the QS Ranking – employer reputation, h-index, citations per paper and academic reputation.