Times Higher Education yearly ranking: AWKUM maintains top position among varsities

PESHAWAR: Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan (AWKUM) has maintained its top position among Pakistan’s young universities for the second consecutive year as the Times Higher Education Young University Ranking-2022 was released.

AWKUM stays at 187th position among the world’s young universities.

This year a list of 790 universities has been released which is almost double the 475 institutions ranked for the year 2021.

Apart from AWKUM, Hazara University is the second young university of KP which has found a position among the top 10 universities of the country that have found a place on the world ranking list.

The Hazara University stays at the 200th number in the list and is number 4 in Pakistan after International Islamic University which is on number 194 in the list and second in the country and Government College University Faisalabad, which is on number 197 in the list and third in the country. A total of 34 Pakistani universities have made it to the list of 790 world institutions.

Times Higher Education makes a yearly ranking of the world’s best universities that are 50 years old or younger.

The ranking is based on13 performance indicators as the flagship The World University Rankings, but the weightings have been adjusted to give less weight to reputation.

The universities are judged across all their core missions - teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook - to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available.

Talking to The News, AWKUM Vice-Chancellor Dr Zahoorul Haq expressed his happiness over getting a top ranking in the country’s young universities.

He said that they were having a competition with prestigious institutions like LUMS, COMSATS, NUST and others and taking the lead of them for the second consecutive year was really a matter of pride for the staff and management of the AWKUM.

“I would like to congratulate all the employees of the university for their performance, the federal, provincial governments and the Higher Education Commission for their support,” he said.

The vice-chancellor remarked that the university has presented surplus budgets for the last two years and it was not facing any financial deficit.

“The university is spending billions of rupees on its lab and equipment and has established a research and innovation fund with Rs 100 million,” he said.

He was thankful to the KP government for supporting the university financially to overcome its long term liabilities.

The vice-chancellor said they were focusing much attention on academic and research activities and have launched more MPhil and PhD programmes.

He said that the university was providing scholarships to every fifth student of the institution and all the orphans, persons with major disabilities and minority communities’

members were getting complete free education in the university.

The vice-chancellor said that their ranking would have been much better if they had a better student-teacher ratio. “We can’t afford the standard ratio of students and teachers for the fear of a hike in cost. Currently, our teacher-student ratio is 1 teacher for 45-50 students, which should be one teacher for 20-25 students,” he said.