In the 2011 Asian university rankings by the Chosun Ilbo and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), POSTECH ranked at the top in the Asian specialized universities category for the second consecutive year. In the overall rankings, Seoul National University ranked sixth, and KAIST and POSTECH 11th and 12th.

In the rankings, Chosun-QS divided the universities into four groups. Group A included the universities with a medical school, Group B universities without a medical school but with more than 12,000 students, and Group C universities without a medical school with less than 12,000 students. Group D included universities offering subjects less than or equal to four of the five subjects that QS categorized.

POSTECH, running three of the five subjects, Engineering & Technology, Natural Sciences, Life Sciences & Medicine, is categorized in Group D under the name of ‘Specialized University.’ POSTECH’s ranking at the top among the specialized universities is not a first, this time being the second such honor.

In the overall ranking, POSTECH ranked twelfth, moving up two notches, and ranked as the top in student per faculty (7th in Asia) and citations per faculty (14th in Asia) among the Korean universities.

Martin Ince of QS said, “POSTECH, due to the small number of departments and campus, is not well-known to corporations compared to other universities; however, the research productions are fabulous.” He also highly evaluated the current president’s ground-breaking policies such as the Bilingual Campus.

QS traditionally has considered subjective evaluations such as peer review or employer review as core factors. POSTECH was thus not in an advantageous position as a small school in the port city of Pohang. The small improvement in the overall ranking, though POSTECH is still third in Korea, shows that in a bigger picture, in the scale of Asia, POSTECH has acquired  increased acknowledgement abroad.

The 2011 ranking was conducted by the Chosun Ilbo and QS with a total of 437 universities in 14 countries participating. The criteria were 60% for research, half of which was for ‘peer review,’ 20% for education, 10% for employer review and 10% for globalization.