PIEAS beats NUST to become Pakistan’s top university

Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a British company specializing in education and ranking of educational institutes, has issued its annual World University Rankings Report for the year 2019. The report ranks Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS)better than NUST.

Seventh time in a row, Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT) has been ranked as the top university in the world out of 1,000 universities evaluated from 85 countries. According to 2019 QS World University Rankings, Pakistan Institute of Engineering & Applied Sciences (PIEAS) has now become the top university of Pakistan, an achievement previously held by National University of Science & Technology (NUST).

PIEAS, that was unable to make it to the ranking table in the previous years, has secured 397th position out of 1000 universities. NUST has also improved its ranking and claimed the 417th position in the list, marking a big leap from last year’s 431-440th spot.

The report cites,

“PIEAS has the highest proportion of Ph.D.’s in its full‑time faculty. PIEAS has excellent experimental and computational facilities for conducting research and development projects in cutting-edge technologies. PIEAS is one of the most research-intensive universities of Pakistan.”

Six other Pakistani universities have also made it to top 1000. Quaid-e-Azam University has also moved its position significantly higher from last year’s 651-700 to 551-560. However, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and University of Engineering Technology (UET) Lahore have maintained their rankings i.e. 701-750 and 801-1000 respectively. The ranking may have improved or fallen because QS only releases the ranking range for lower-ranked universities in the world.

COMSATS (751-800) has also made it to the top 1000 universities in the latest rankings which could not make its position in last year’s ranking. The University of Punjab has also managed to register its name in the list of top 1000 universities, while the University of Karachi and the University of Lahore have failed to maintain their positions in the top 1000.