Statement of IZTECH

İzmir Institute of Technology (IZTECH) is pleased to participate in the More Than Our Rank initiative. Students, employers, funders and the public in general count on global rankings profoundly even if they do not fully comprehend what these rankings and indicators correspond to. We believe that global rankings tend to highlight the strengths of old, wealthy and large universities in the global north. As a young and small research-intensive university of the global south, our university performs well in the recently invented categories of global rankings that aim to include those institutions that are structurally unseen in the conventional global rankings. For example;

IZTECH is ranked 146 in the QS World Rankings Emerging Europe and Central Asia in 2021.

As a recent reward, we can name the Times Higher Education Awards Asia’s Internationalization Strategy of the Year that is given to IZTECH in 2022. On the other hand, as we are a young university it is highly impossible for us to compete with the universities that are hundreds of years old when it comes to reputation. Therefore, our university performs better in the Young Universities rankings in general.

İzmir Institute of Technology is More Than Our Rank across many dimensions. For instance, the rankings do not value that IZTECH is a pioneering research university that is strong in entrepreneurship and innovation with 18 % of its faculty owning a company in Teknopark complex located on IZTECH’s campus. As a university supporting university-industry projects as well as university-society collaborations, we believe that it is critical to acknowledge the entrepreneurship strength of IZTECH. Moreover, global rankings fail to capture the facts that IZTECH is ranked number one for the WoS article number per faculty among state universities in the country and IZTECH’s publishing rate in the top 10 % ranked journals in the world is well above European and world averages, with its 43.3 % in 2021.

Additionally, global rankings fail to demonstrate that IZTECH is in the top five in terms of library spending per person (students and staff) in Turkey.

Neither do they capture the noteworthy impacts of our research related to life and earth-saving matters such as cancer treatment, robotics, design for resilient cities, and green technologies all of which have been awarded Prizes in their respective fields.