Safa Jafari Safa, Office of Communications, communications@aub.edu.lb
AUB ranked 73rd in the
QS Graduate Employability Rankings issued on September 23, 2021. The university continues to rank first in the Middle East and North Africa, which it has done since the official launch of graduate employability rankings in 2017 and is the only institution in the region to appear among the top 100 ranked universities worldwide.
The QS Graduate Employability Rankings look at the student-employer relationship, assigning a weight to indicators measured during education at the university (opportunities) as well as after graduation (outcomes).
In the category of outcomes/results, AUB had a substantial ranking record in each of the three indicators: employer reputation, alumni outcomes, and graduate employment rate.
AUB ranked 140th in employer reputation, which is determined by surveying over 50,000 employers who were asked to identify universities whose graduates they prefer to recruit and which they source the most competent, innovative, and effective candidates. This year, 450,000 employer nominations (45% more than last year) were aggregated at the respondent level and only the most recent nominations were considered for each organization/respondent from the past five years.
AUB also ranked in the top 55 globally in the alumni outcomes indicator, which is measured by identifying the number of AUB alumni sectoral leaders from various leaderships lists of respected awards and rankings from all parts of the world, published within the last six years.
In the graduate employment rate, AUB ranked 19th globally. This indicator measures the proportion of graduates in full- or part-time employment within 12 months of graduation.
QS World University Rankings (QS WUR)
The overall scores of the QS World University Rankings (QS WUR) issued in June 2021, measure the following indicators with these specified weights: academic reputation (40%), employer reputation (10%), faculty student ratio (20%), citations per faculty (20%), proportion of international faculty (5%), and proportion of international students (5%).
Here as well, AUB remained at its best percentile evolution by performing among the top 19% of the 1,300 ranked institutions. The overall drop in rank from 220= to 242= is explained by the 30% increase in number of ranked institutions (from 1,002 to 1,300). In this ranking, AUB was placed 149th in employer reputation, weighted at a lower percentage (10%) in this QS WUR, compared to the QS Graduate Employability Rankings, which allocated a higher weight for this criterion (30%).
QS WUR - Academic Reputation
AUB has continued to perform well in the academic reputation metric, which counts for the highest weighting (40%). For this category, QS surveyed over 130,000 individuals in higher education, asking them to nominate the best universities for research in their respective subject area. Two million nominations of academics were aggregated at the respondent level.
QS WUR - Citations per Faculty
AUB continues to improve its performance in the citations per faculty indicator which constitutes 20% of the total score and examines the global research landscape. This is calculated by taking the total number of citations received by all papers produced by an institution across a five-year period, divided by the number of faculty members at that institution.
QS WUR by Subject
In the QS World University Rankings by Subject, released in March 2021, AUB earned a high ranking and a consistent improvement in its performance in four out of five broad subject areas: arts and humanities; social sciences and management; engineering and technology; and life sciences and medicine.
These broad subject area rankings were compiled using four sources with a different weight for each subject. The first two sources are QS's global surveys of academics and employers, which are used to assess institutions' international reputation in each subject. The second two sources measure the “average number of citations per publication" and the “H-index" (indicative of productivity and research impact of published work) in the relevant subject.
Individual subject rankings saw AUB in the top 350 globally in 14 categories, with development studies in the 51-100 range. Medicine, architecture, and politics maintained their rankings of 151-200, while accounting and finance, and business and management studies rose substantially to be placed in the 151-200 range, along with civil and structural engineering.
