The Asia University Rankings 2025 will be published on 23 April

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU) was not always a leading research university. It was established in 1991 as the result of a merger, principally to provide undergraduate education in engineering to serve Singapore¡¯s then manufacturing-based economy. The city-state already had the National University of Singapore (NUS) as a well-established comprehensive institution with a good international reputation. NTU was in second place and not very visible on the international scene. It was ranked 174th?in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings in 2011.

Fast forward?only 14 years and NTU is now 30th?globally, among the top five universities in Asia and the number one young university in the world ¨C as well as one of the fastest-rising young institutions, having climbed 144 places during that period.

This is an account of how the South-east Asian university made an unprecedented rapid leap in all rankings and indices to become an exemplar for others to follow and a new ¡°go to¡± place for academics worldwide. The role of rankings in NTU¡¯s strategic development and in benchmarking became an important measure of the university¡¯s success.

To appreciate how this happened one has to understand the local context and the history of Singapore. By the turn of the millennium, the Singapore government, facing challenges from rapidly developing neighbouring countries such as China, India and Indonesia, with their economy of scale and lower labour costs, realised that it could not compete in manufacturing and had to transform into a service- and knowledge-based economy. One measure it introduced to achieve this was substantially increasing research funding, especially for the universities. The vehicle for this development was the formation of the National Research Foundation (NRF), which took a strategic overview of research and also provided competitive funding to individual researchers and various research constellations, promoting talent recruitment and fostering collaboration with national and international academia as well as industry.

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The initial call for research grants in 2006 was not successful for NTU; it was clear that NUS was dominating the scene. In fact, in response to the first call for the substantially funded Research Centres of Excellence programme, NTU failed completely, with none of its bids even making the reserve shortlist.

NTU had to drastically change its strategy and international visibility if it were to play any significant role in Singapore¡¯s new development. While change in a university is often difficult to achieve, it was much easier to implement in the ¡°top-down¡± structures that exist in Singapore.

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The NTU board decided to reform the leadership of the institution, with the appointment of a provost ¨C Bertil Andersson ¨C as its chief academic officer, following a comprehensive international search. That set a new tone as NTU had previously focused on education; research had not been on the agenda and was even discouraged.

Together with the deans, the first and most significant step was to undertake a review of all faculty (approximately 1,000), based on international best practice, to determine how they matched with the aims of our new ambitions. The outcome was that as many as 25 per cent (the poorer research performers and teachers) had to leave. Most importantly, this allowed NTU to successfully pursue a proactive recruitment of excellent senior and junior faculty, many coming from top universities all around the world, especially the US and the UK. It also spurred the remaining 75 per cent of faculty, who had survived the review and had thus received a ¡°quality mark¡±, to become more empowered in a changing academic research culture.

This favourable confluence of factors (national agenda, more money and high-quality faculty) overcame an innate academic conservatism, made research a priority and resulted in NTU gaining substantial research grants. The university also attracted many international academic partnerships and advanced industrial collaborations, including setting up a new medical school in Singapore together with Imperial College London.

At the same time, teaching was not neglected and following an intensive review, the style of teaching was modernised, moving to a quasi-¡°Oxbridge¡± style tutorial approach using modern technology and backed by another significant financial investment.

The overall strategy for NTU was to transform itself into a research-intensive university. Within that ambition, NTU started to develop a series of five-year strategic research plans. The priorities covered broad interdisciplinary research areas which, frequently, were aligned with but not driven by the government¡¯s stated aims (such as sustainability, comprehensive healthcare and security).

It was clear that the university had started to develop well and several international evaluation panels, initiated by the Singapore government or NRF, gave NTU the ¡°thumbs up¡±. Still, it was not always easy to communicate the progress to a wider academic or public audience. NTU¡¯s reputation was still quite bleak.

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However, after a few years, various university rankings started to reflect the reformation of the university ¨C and that made a difference. From initial small improvements, NTU soon made significant moves upwards in the ranking tables, joining the global top 50 of the THE World University Rankings in 2020 ¨C ahead of both Brown University and Dartmouth College in the Ivy League. In the local perspective, NTU was now?on a par with NUS and in some league tables, in certain years, even ahead. All rankings pointed in the same direction, but it was the speed of the advance that was seen as most remarkable.

Ranks of Singapore¡¯s top two universities in THE World University Rankings over time

NTU also excelled in several disciplinary rankings, including in the rapidly developing area of artificial intelligence ¨C but it achieved high recognition outside the STEM subjects too. The ranking results were supported by various bibliometric analyses and NTU showed dramatic progress when it came to field-normalised citations, taking the prime position in Asia.

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Rankings confirmed and reinforced the strategic direction of developments, increased NTU¡¯s reputation and gave enhanced visibility to its endeavours. This advance had very positive consequences. First, it reduced opposition to the drastic changes within the university, and helped to convince its own academics that the ¡°pain¡± had been worthwhile (including instilling a new pride in their academic success); second, it convinced the NTU board that the strategy was correct and working and encouraged further reform; third, it convinced local media, and through them, most crucially, Singaporean students and parents, that NTU was now a world-leading university and one to which they would send their children. NUS was no longer always the first choice. ?

The visibility from the rankings enabled NTU to recruit more leading academics, resulting in a step change in the level of senior faculty, outstanding young researchers and excellent students. The university was even able to attract several young researchers who gave up their prestigious ERC awards in Europe to come to Singapore and NTU. So, we had entered a virtuous circle with success breeding success. The rankings performance also gave NTU international academic recognition, which was important in developing international collaborations with universities like Berkeley and Cambridge and with companies like Rolls-Royce. Many academic leaders visited NTU, particularly from Asia, to try to understand what was driving the rapid development and whether the formula could be applied to their own universities.

Another aspect in which rankings were important was in benchmarking with both peer and aspirational universities. The chosen peers were the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and ?cole Polytechnique F¨¦d¨¦rale de Lausanne, which both had a similar profile to NTU and were also on an upward trajectory, while ETH Zurich was selected as an aspirational university.

Rankings did not directly drive the strategy nor was achieving specific rankings one of the official KPIs. However, there was an informal understanding within the governance team that the strategy should result in getting NTU into the top 50 of world universities, which was considered a challenging ambition. Initially, it was not the position in the rankings that mattered so much but that, each year, the university was moving up the ladder, even if the change was not always very big. In the latter years everything came together with NTU consistently achieving a top ranking and making significant jumps in positions.

By giving public visibility to the progress of the university, it convinced important stakeholders that the university was changing and advancing. Without rankings, it would have been very difficult to communicate the progress that NTU was making. Interestingly, the international community readily accepted NTU¡¯s progress and new status while the local community in Singapore initially was more reserved, probably?owing to perceptions deeply embedded in society.

In conclusion, NTU changed dramatically in a relatively short time span, recruiting new talent at all levels from undergraduates to very senior professors, and transforming itself into a research-intensive top university. Rankings did not directly drive these changes but, by publicly communicating progress and providing easily understood benchmarks, rankings were valuable in serving to create a new baseline for the university and its further development and in changing public perceptions. In that sense, the NTU success story would not have been possible without university rankings.

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Bertil Andersson was provost of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore from 2007 to 2011, and then president until 2017. Tony Mayer is research integrity officer and adviser at the institution.