Vietnam universities enter Asia top 100 for first time

Ton Duc Thang University in Ho Chi Minh City is ranked 73rd while Duy Tan University in Da Nang City hit 91st in the Asia University Rankings 2022 that Times Higher Education (THE) released Wednesday.

This marks the first time ever that Vietnamese universities have broken into the Asia top 100 list in the annual ranking.

Featuring 616 institutions from 31 countries and territories, the 2022 ranking of the top Asian universities is THE's biggest ever.

The rankings are scored on 11 key indicators, which are academic reputation (30 percent), employer reputation (20 percent), faculty/student ratio (10 percent), international research network (10 percent), citations per paper (10 percent) and papers per faculty (5 percent), staff with a PhD (5 percent), proportion of international faculty (2.5 percent) and proportion of international students (2.5 percent), proportion of inbound exchange students (2.5 percent) and proportion of outbound exchange students (2.5 percent).

Aside from the two schools in top 100, Vietnam have three others universities ranked, with Vietnam National University, Hanoi in the 301-350 group, Vietnam National University, HCMC in the 401-500 group, and Hanoi University of Science and Technology in the 500+ group.

China still leads the Asia rankings this year, with Tsinghua and Peking universities taking the top two spots for the third consecutive year. They are followed by the National University of Singapore and the University of Hong Kong.

In Southeast Asia, in addition to two Singapore schools at the top and five Vietnamese schools, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines are also represented.

Compared to 2021, Malaysia overtook Thailand to become the country with the most ranked universities at 18, of which the University of Malaya has the highest ranking, at 55th.

Thailand has 17, Indonesia 14, and the Philippines, two.

Times Higher Education became known for publishing the annual Times Higher Education – Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, which first appeared in November 2004.

In 2009, it broke with QS, the world's largest international higher education network, and signed an agreement with Thomson Reuters to provide the data instead.