In September, the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) announced the QS World University Rankings 2014/15. According to this chart, POSTECH ranks 86th globally with an overall score of 72.9. Compared to last year, it has moved 21 steps higher.  The ranking is based on 6 criteria: academic reputation (40%), employer reputation (10%), faculty/ student ratio (20%), citations per faculty (20%), international student ratio (10%), and international staff ratio (5%). This year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) came in first place, the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London came in second, and Harvard University came in fourth with respective scores of 100.0, 99.4, 99.4, and 99.3.
Although POSTECH has a long way to go among the universities with more age, according to QS, it is a good competitor for universities under the age of 50. In the same month, QS announced its University Rankings for the Top 50 Under 50 2014. According to its guidelines, POSTECH ranked 4th globally. Compared to last year, POSTECH has moved one rank higher. The QS Top 50 Under 50 is a ranking based on the highest performing young institutions established within the last 50 years in the QS World University Rankings 2014/15. The top 3 universities under the age of 50 are Nanyang Technological University in Singapore -84.0, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) -83.3, and KAIST -79.9.