Dhaka University and Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Buet) have failed to make any progress in the latest QS world University ranking of 2021.

Like the previous year, both universities have been placed in the 801-1000 bracket.

QS does not assign specific positions for universities rated below 500.

University of Dhaka has slipped 200 places, from 601 bracket to 800-1000 bracket in the rankings, between 2012 and 2020.

After falling to the 701+ bracket in 2014, DU held that position till it slipped to the bracket below in 2019.

QS ranked 1,000 universities from 80 different locations, surveyed 102,662 academics and 51,649 employers whose insights and opinions determine the "reputation" indicator. They also analysed 18,530,368 research papers and 138,397,765 citations, recorded by bibliometric database Scopus/Elsevier.

The institutes have been ranked on six metrics - academic, reputation, employer reputation, faculty/student ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty ratio, and international student ratio.

Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) in United States of America continues to be at the top spot, ninth year in a row. Stanford University, Harvard University, and California Institute of Technology - all American Universities - are at second, third, and fourth positions respectively.

The University of Oxford, the United Kingdom's top institution and also Europe's, fell from fourth to fifth. Its close rival, the University of Cambridge, remained at seventh.

Twenty-six Asian universities were named in the global top 100,  the highest number from this continent till date. These were split between Mainland China and South Korea (six each), Hong Kong and Japan (five each), Singapore (two), and Malaysia and Taiwan (one each).

In Asia, the top two universities are National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, also in Singapore, at the 11th and 13th spot in the rankings respectively.

Eight Indian and two Pakistani institutes have made it to the top 500=.

Being the only international ranking to have received the International Ranking Expert Group (IREG) approval, the QS ranking is viewed as one of the three most-widely read university rankings in the world, along with the Academic Ranking of World Universities and Times Higher Education World University Rankings.