Korea University ranked first in Korea in QS Asian University Rankings for two consecutive years

Korea University has ranked first in Korea in an important performance evaluation for the second year in a row.

Korea University ranked first (13th overall) in the 'QS Asia University Rankings 2021' announced by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a global university evaluation agency based in the UK.

Korea University took first place last year for the first time and again this year, solidifying its position as the best university in Korea. With the addition of the ‘international research network’ indicator in 2018, a total of 11 indicators are evaluated. The weightings of each indicator are: 30% for academic reputation, 20% for employer reputation, 10% for faculty/student ratio, 10% for international research network, 10% for citations per paper, 5% for papers per faculty, 5% for Faculty/staff with a PhD, 2.5% for international faculty, 2.5% for international students, 2.5% for inbound exchange, and 2.5% for outbound exchange.While the rankings of most Korean universities have declined, Korea University has maintained its top position in Korea by receiving positive evaluations in relation to indicators such as employer reputation and academic reputation. And the fact that its ranking in the ‘faculty/student ratio’ category rose by eight places from last year demonstrates that Korea University's educational environment has improved further.

■Excellence Indicator 1: Employer Reputation
“Creating creative talents and new values through various extracurricular activities”

Korea University has long been praised for maintaining a good reputation in various domestic and international evaluations and for nurturing the talented people required by society. The university aims to be a 'people-oriented university that creates new values,” and has produced talents capable of integrated and ethical thinking rather than possessing piecemeal knowledge. In addition to their major education, Korea University recommends to students extracurricular activities that allow them to naturally acquire teamwork and communication skills, and to embrace broad thinking and openmindedness. Korea University students learn a sense of belonging, responsibility, and leadership while gaining experience in volunteering, international culture, and business entrepreneurship through extracurricular activities.

A curricular and extracurricular integrated management program called ‘KUchive,’ introduced by Korea University as a first at a domestic university, helps students to manage their activities in all areas from admission to graduation, to easily check their curricular (major + liberal arts) and extracurricular activities, and to assess and review their own competencies through the newly developed core competency diagnosis tool. In addition, the Social Contribution Center, which grew out of the Social Volunteer Corps, serves as a control tower for non-curricular courses by overseeing various social contribution activities while developing and running social innovation convergence education programs. Korea University is striving to enhance its status in society by strengthening its social contribution functions, by for example establishing programs to systematically promote socially inclusive growth.

Korea University provides career development services to students who want to start their career journey, so that each student's experience and competency can be expressed in the form of job-seeking competitiveness, in this way helping job seekers to establish themselves in their desired industry and occupation. Korea University's Job Academy, an educational program designed to improve students' understanding of the nature and practices of their desired career, is receiving a good response from students. The university also offers one-on-one customized career counseling that provides career development-related counseling to job seekers. In addition, about 30 regular and occasional programs are run, including the Mock Interview Clinic where students can receive interview coaching and feedback through mock interviews with HR managers, and the SOP Proofreading Clinic.

Through these and other extracurricular activities, Korea University has been nurturing creative future talents and supporting their advancement into society in various ways, thus enhancing employers’ trust in Korea University graduates.

■Excellence Indicator 2: Academic Reputation & International Research Network
“Focusing on solving the problems facing humanity through scholar-centered, practical research”

The reason Korea University's research capabilities continue to receive positive evaluations is because its researcher-centered support programs are bearing fruit. The university is promoting various projects to create a healthy research ecosystem, so that practical research focusing on making an enhanced social contribution as well as ever more productive knowledge creation can be conducted.

Korea University runs a proofreading support program to encourage the publication of papers in international academic journals, supports convergence research through a multidisciplinary research support program, and prioritizes both quantitative and qualitative performance when evaluating research performance, in this way ensuring that researchers receive appropriate compensation for their research performance. In addition, the university created KU-FRG to provide a full range of support to researchers in conducting creative and challenging research, large-scale research projects, convergence research, research in basic and rare disciplines, and international research cooperation activities.

Korea University's Inseong Scholarship Fund strives to produce Nobel laureate-level researchers by disbursing generous research funds to outstanding new faculty members and world-class researchers on campus. The university also runs a Research Coordinator (RC) system that strategically and systematically supports professors' research.

Korea University plans to further strengthen the support system centered on researchers. It also aims to bolster its research capabilities by opening an AI graduate school which will be based on networks with leading overseas universities and research institutes, with the goal of achieving the Common Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations. Ultimately the focus will be on practical work that can play a part in solving various problems facing the international community.

■Excellence Indicator 3: Faculty/Student Ratio

Korea University has also made efforts to expand its faculty in order to provide an ever higher quality educational environment to students. In recent years, the number of faculty members at Korea University has steadily increased, resulting in a rise of eight places in the Faculty/Student Ratio category of the QS rankings.