The sixth edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject, released on TopUniversities.com, features a record-breaking 42 disciplines, making it the largest-ever ranking of its kind. The Colorado School of Mines has been ranked as the world’s best university for the study of Mineral and Mining Engineering, in what is the first-ever global ranking for this subject.

The expert opinion of 76,798 academics and 44,426 employers informed the results, alongside the analysis of 28.5 million research papers and over 113 million citations sourced from the Scopus/Elsevier bibliometric database. This contributed to QS evaluating 713 institutions worldwide that provide a degree in Mineral/Mining Engineering, internally ranking 403 of these based on the data received, before publishing the world’s top 100 institutions in the final rankings.

In second place for Mining Engineering is MIT, which is top in the tables of the four other Engineering disciplines QS rank as part of their global analysis of higher education. Completing the top three is its compatriot, Stanford University.

Some of the rankings will be a surprise to many, with no University of Witwatersrand, nor any Canadian universities nor Camborne Scholl of Mines at the University of Essex, to name but a few missing institutions.

QS’s Jack Moran explains, “we have included institutions that have been voted for by academics identifying themselves with Mining Engineering and strong research in relevant disciplines, even if they only offer clear specialist engineering programs in the Civil Engineering space.

“Whilst we recognize that Mining Engineering is a distinct discipline in its own right, hence publishing a separate list, we also observe that, perhaps due to the small number of dedicated programs, many companies in the space also target graduates from Civil Engineering programs.

QS welcomes input to improve the accuracy of these rankings and can be contacted through Head of Public Relations, Simona Bizzozero: [email protected]

This year’s Mining Engineering ranking features the world’s top 100 places to study the subject. The most-featured country in the ranking is the United States which takes 6 of the top-20 places, and 24 places overall – nearly one-quarter. The Universities of Cambridge and Oxford are also in the top five.

However, excellence can be found outside the US-UK duopoly. The best university for the subject outside these countries is Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, which ranks 8th worldwide. It is closely followed by Asia’s best university for the subject, the University of Hong Kong, which is 9th. Australia is represented in the top 10 by the University of Queensland, which ranks joint 10th with Japan’s university of Tokyo. Latin America’s strongest university for the study of Mineral and Mining Engineering is the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), which ranks 36th.

QS World University Rankings by Subject 2016 – Mining Engineering (Top 10)

2016    Institution        Country

1          Colorado School of Mines       United States

2          Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)            United States

3          Stanford University     United States

4          University of Cambridge         United Kingdom

5          University of Oxford   United Kingdom

6          University of California, Berkeley (UCB)        United States

7          Imperial College London        United Kingdom

8          ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)   Switzerland

9          University of Hong Kong (HKU)           Hong Kong

10=      The University of Queensland (UQ)    Australia

10=      The University of Tokyo          Japan