MOSCOW INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY RANKING The Three University Missions Moscow August 2020 The Three University Missions Moscow International University Ranking 2020 Contents Key Facts........................................................................................................................................2 Methodology...............................................................................................................................4 Rating Criteria.................................................................................................................................6 Appendix. The Three University Missions Ranking 2020..........................................................10 About the Project Moscow International University Ranking is a fundamentally new academic ranking, the fi rst to evaluate all the three key university missions: education, research, and interaction with society. The ranking uses a number of new criteria calculated on the basis of objective data, and does not use any subjective reputation surveys. The initiative of creating the ranking has been supported by leading universities of Russia, China, India, Iran, Japan, and Turkey. The ranking methodology has had a wide public discussion in Russia and abroad with a total of over 100 contributing universities. The ranking expert council brings together 25 experts from 16 countries. The ranking is operated by Association of Rating, Ranking, and Other Performance Evaluations Makers (ARM), the members of which are leading ranking and research centres. The project is supported by Clarivate Analytics, providing data and metrics from InCites and Global Institutional Profi les Project (GIPP). The pilot issue of The Three University Missions ranking was released in December 2017, the second issue, in November 2018, the third issue, in September 2019. In 2018, the ranking successfully passed an independent audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers Audit, part of PwC’s global network. © Association of Rating, Ranking, and Other Performance Evaluations Makers (ARM), 2020 The Three University Missions Moscow International University Ranking 2020 Key Facts and Figures The 2020 issue of The Three University Missions rankings features virtually all of the world’s internationally oriented universities. 97 countries are represented in the top 1,500 list, which is a signifi cant growth against last year’s 79 countries. Global coverage The 2020 rankings issue suggests that the majority of the world’s best higher education institutions are located in Europe: a total of 493 universities, or almost 33% of the list. Europe is closely followed by Asia with 32% (last year Asia accounted for 29% of the rankings table). North America comes third with 17% (a fall from 20% last year). Russia is represented by 7% of universities on the list, a growth by 1% over last year. About the same amount, 7% of the listed institutions, represent Latin America. Oceania and Africa come last with 3% and 2% of the featured universities respectively. As to specifi c countries, the top 5 include the United States (220 universities), China (122), Russia (101), United Kingdom (98), and Japan (93). The upper part of the table is dominated by the U.S. universities, just like last year. Their dominating positions, however, were slightly challenged: for the fi rst time ever, Cambridge University has entered top 3, followed by Oxford University. The top two British universities have pushed last year’s bronze medalist, University of Pennsylvania, to fi fth rank. The rise of Britain’s best universities is largely attributable to the educational mission: they have signifi - cantly increased the number of prestigious student contest prizes. Cambridge has also increased the percentage of international students. In contrast, University of Pennsylvania has shown a negative trend in all of the indicators of the Education group. ETH Zurich (Switzerland), ranked 14th, showed the best result among the universities of con- tinental Europe. Peking University (ranked 15th) and Tokyo University (16th) were highest ranked in Asia. Russia’s top higher education institution, Lomonosov Moscow State University, was ranked at 21st position. The University of Melbourne became the top ranked one in Oceania (51st), University of Cape Town, Africa’s top performer, was ranked 136th, and National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the highest ranked university of Latin America, 162nd. The three missions: leaders, facts, and trends The composition of leaders in mission one, education, suggests a parity between Europe and North America. Each of the macroregions in represented by 13 universities in the top 30 education subranking list. Cambridge University, École Polytechnique (France), and Lomonosov Moscow State University were showed best results education among European universities; MIT and Harvard University became North America’s leaders. The strongest point of the American universities was fi nancial resources: American universities have a budget-to-student ratio on average 3,6 higher than that of top European universities. Europe, in turn, boasted of a clear advantage in human resources. Top European universities showed an average academic staff- to-student ratio of 0.22, while top U.S. institutions’ respective value was 0.19. Besides, European students demonstrated a higher level of competitiveness: they are 3.8 times more successful at international student contests than U.S. students. Four more leaders in education featured in the subranking’s top 30 list were Asian uni- versities: Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Peking University (mainland China), University of Tokyo (Japan), and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The research mission evaluation indicated unrivaled performance by English- speaking countries. The top 30 is dominated by U.S. universities, accompanied by Canadian, British, and 2 The Three University Missions Moscow International University Ranking 2020 Australian ones. The only country not having English as its offi cial language featured in the top 30 in research is Israel, represented by Technion — Israel Institute of Technology. U.S. universities’ leading positions in the research subranking table are due to two factors, the level of research fi nancing and citation impact. American universities attract on average 2.2 times more fi nancing to support their research activities than German ones. The U. S. average beats that of Japanese and British universities by a margin of 2.5 and 3.9 times respectively. Among the top 200 leaders in normalised citation impact 65 are from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, which is represented in the top 200 NCI list by as few as 27 universities. Research publications by American universities participating in the rankings were cited on average 1.3 times better than the average world level. The University and Society subranking list showed the highest georgraphic diversity of the leaderboard. Among the University and Society mission leaders were representatives of North America (U.S. and Canada), Latin America (Mexico, Brasil), Europe (Russia, the U.K.), Asia (mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan), and Australia. The third mission evaluation outcome signifi cantly changed from 2019. First, the list of indicators was expanded with Transparency, a new indicator evaluating universities’ informa- tional openness. Second, the University and Society group of indicators became the fi rst one to have been affected by the pandemic. The Education and Research groups of indicators had not responded to the restrictions caused by COVID-19, and it is not surprising, as such indicators as, for instance, academic mobility proxies, are obtained by ranking compilers with a lag. The size of a university’s website is the indicator to have sustained the biggest impact of the pandemic. The world average has dramatically fallen from 0.054 to 0.037 per univer- sity (in promille of the world’s total internet users). There was a signifi cant drop in averages of some of the countries most attractive for international students: United Kingdom (–46%), Switzerland (–41%), and Australia (–23%). The United States experienced in this indicator a fall by 36%, and the only university to have signifi cantly grown its internet audience was John Hopkins University, which has outstandingly gained in popularity by publishing pandemic reports. Johns Hopkins gained over 500% over its 2019 result and was ranked fi rst in internet audience of all the world’s universities in spring 2020. The rest of the U.S. universities featured in the rankings list demostrated a decrease in internet audience, with an exception of Harvard with insignifi cant growth. The decrease in the web audience might be a warning before big changes in the global education market for higher education: potential international students started to be less interested in opportunities for studying abroad. Many experts suggest that as a consequence even the leading universities may experience a fall in international student numbers. Whether it is going to happen or not, depends, however, on how long and strict the pandemic- induced restrictions are going to be. The reverse side of the pandemic is increasing offer in the market for online learning the Three University Missions compilers spotted. The average number of massive open online courses on the biggest platforms per university increased to 5.3 from 3.5 last year. Russia’s average increased by 77%, the average number of courses per a U.S. and Australian university,