The accolades continue rolling in for Florida Institute of Technology, which has again been named one of the world’s top 200 universities.
Florida Tech’s inclusion in the 2014-15 Times Higher Education World University Rankings comes just weeks after U.S. News & World Report named the Melbourne, Florida-based school a Tier 1 Best National University. It is the fifth straight year that Florida Tech has earned the prestigious designation from U.S. News.
Only three Florida colleges secured spots in the Times Higher Education rankings, which measure educational institutions across five key categories: teaching; research; industry incomes; international outlook; and citations.
Florida Tech was ranked sixth in the world in the citations category, which gauges how institutions disseminate ideas and highlights a university’s contributions “to the sum of human knowledge,” according to Times Higher Education. Florida Tech was ranked above Stanford University and the Ivy League institutions of Yale and Harvard, among others.
Founded at the dawn of the Space Age in 1958, Florida Institute of Technology originally served as an institute of higher learning for scientists and researchers at the nearby Kennedy Space Center.
In a statement, Florida Tech President Anthony J. Catanese said the university “has long understood the importance of being an international leader in research, of allowing our students, who hail from 112 countries, to experience unprecedented levels of hands-on research.”
“Times Higher Education’s latest survey shows that we are succeeding in achieving these important standards, and it gives us further motivation to continue and improve on our status as one of the best universities in the world,” Catanese said.
Florida Tech students can choose from scores of undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degree programs, including dozens of bachelor’s and master’s degrees and for-credit graduate certificates offered 100% online. Those online programs, which are powered by University Alliance, a division of Bisk Education, feature an e-learning system that provides working professionals, military servicemembers and other students with 24/7 access to video-based lectures.
Times Higher Education’s annual rankings consider a robust teaching environment to be a characteristic of top-performing universities.
“With this in mind, [the rankings] are carefully designed to capture excellence in teaching and research against a university’s own mission and its own unique profile,” Phil Baty, editor of the rankings, said in a statement.
