NTU ranked the 87th place in the QS World University Rankings -
The best performance in recent years

QS, the British institution for evaluation of higher education released its 2011 World University Rankings on September 5th. Of more than 600 universities taken under evaluation in the world, National Taiwan University was ranked the 87th place. This was the best performance of NTU in recent years, as NTU was the only university from Taiwan that made into the top 100. This ranking was based on six indicators, including academic peer review (this year more than 32,000 people participated in the review), employer review (this year more than 16,00 employers participated in the review), faculty to students ratio, number of citation of faculty members’ research papers, and the number of foreign faculty and foreign students, etc.

This year’s new ranking indicates that the first phase of NTU’s “Aim for Top University Plan” has reached its preset goal. What remains to be done during the second phase of the “Aim for Top University Plan” is to improve the space and environment for research, so we can progress from being outstanding to being excellent. As of now, we have accumulated enough dynamic powers, what we need to do next is to extend our present research base, to uphold our core values, to amend our strategies, to recruit new talents, to identify the areas in which we have competitive advantage, and to cooperate with famous universities or research institutes in the world, so that we can achieve the “flywheel effect” (once a stationary flywheel is set in motion, the weight of the flywheel and its forward push will become part of the driving force, to the extent that no external power is needed to push the flywheel and it will keep spinning automatically), and accelerate our growth.

At present National Taiwan University has already set up ten major research centers. And we have team-based plans to pursue academic excellence. In the near future we expect to come with 20 academic areas which shall receive prioritized support, and we shall discover promising young scholars under 45 years of age, and provide them with development plans for their academic career. In so doing, we hope to continue to enhance our international academic reputation, to lead the technological and academic trends of our nation, and to make greater contributions to our society.