Times Higher Education, the British publication known to provide global higher education coverage, released Impact Rankings 2022 on Thursday. The standings of the universities, which are based on the assessment of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, rely on four broad areas: research, stewardship, outreach, and teaching.
The 2022 Impact Rankings is the fourth edition and includes over 1,406 universities from 106 countries and regions, up from 1,117 institutions from 94 territories last year.
Key Sustainable Development Goals have been focused upon. Zero Poverty, Zero Hunger, Good Health and Well-Being, Quality Education, Gender Equality, Clean Water and Sanitation, Affordable and Clean Energy, Decent Work and Economic Growth, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, Reduced Inequalities, Sustainable Cities and Communities, Responsible Consumption and Production, Climate Action, Life Below Water, Life on Land, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, and Partnership for the Goals, are the individual SDGs that have been used to measure an institution’s social and economic impact in the rankings.
According to THE rankings, two Indian universities are ranked in the top 100. In the Impact Rankings 2022, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham was ranked 41, while Lovely Professional University was ranked 74. The Impact Rankings 2022 includes around 64 Indian universities, making India the fourth most well-represented country in the ranking.
Institutions such as Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), OP Jindal Global University, Shoolini University, Amity University, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) University, Chitkara University, Calcutta University, etc rank in the top 800 of the list.
In THE Impact Rankings 2022, Western Sydney University of Australia achieved first place. The second and third places, respectively, went to Arizona State University in the United States and Western University in Canada. The top ten universities were from the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Japan, with two universities from emerging economies: King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia’s Universiti Sains Malaysia.
THE Impact Rankings which are conducted to demonstrate a university’s commitment to delivering SDGs make it compulsory for universities to have SDG 17, Partnership for the Goals, for inclusion in the overall table.
A university’s final score in the overall table is calculated by combining its score in SDG 17 with its top three scores out of the remaining 16 SDGs. SDG 17 accounts for 22 percent of the overall score, while the other SDGs each carry a weightage of 26 percent. This means that different universities are scored based on a different set of SDGs, depending on their focus. The score from each SDG is scaled so that the highest score in each SDG in the overall calculation is 100 and the lowest score is 0. Universities have submitted their own institutional data to be ranked.
