Keeping Up With ITMO University is No Easy Task

RAEX ranking agency (RA-expert) put together the fifth annual ranking of Russian universities. ITMO University for the first time became one of the top twenty Russian universities rising up four places since to last year. The ranking agency also acknowledged ITMO as the most dynamically developed university participating in “Project 5-100”.

ITMO University is up from 22^nd to 19^th place in the 2016 ranking. The key factors that propelled this rise are an improvement in the availability of resources, and strengthening international integration. The number of students who have participated in overseas internships has increased. Right now this figure is double the average figure amongst all other participants of the rankings (1.2% against 0.6%).

The overall university ranking consists of three categories, amongst these are quality of education, level of graduates’ demand among employers and level of research activity at the university. ITMO University has consistently had good results according to these criteria, taking 13^th and 12^th place for educational quality and research activity respectively.

“ITMO University’s leap forward in the RA-ranking fully reflects the university’s dynamic progress in all key areas of development. In particular, the category for educational quality and teaching includes indicators regarding foreign students and the number of students participating in double-degree programs with overseas universities, and internationalization is one of our main priorities. Each year we see a real increase in this area, at least by several percent. We see the same situation in the research activity category which not only includes publications, which have increased from year to year but also innovation, a strong area of development at ITMO University. We are part of the top-20 universities in Russia and this is a result of the hard work of a huge amount of people in ITMO University’s dream-team,” – said Ekaterina Mikhailova, the Head of Unit of Strategic Planning and Ranking Research.

In general, the greatest progress of the universities in the last year has been an increase in the amount of scientific publications (+43% per employee) and attracting foreign students – which has increased from 7.4% to 8.3%.

Also, at the beginning of 2016 RAEX became the first Russian and fourth world organization whose university ranking was successfully internationally audited by IREG Observatory. Overseas experts proved that the methodology of the ranking, how it is prepared, and how the results are presented meets high-quality standards.