The Nanyang Technological University has made the top 10 in a ranking released yesterday for universities under 50 years old.
It came in eighth, moving up from the 16th spot last year, in the rankings published by Times Higher Education.
Its rise in the ranks comes about a week after the 22-year- old Singapore university took the No. 2 position in a similar ranking by London-based educational consultancy Quacquarelli Symonds (QS).
The QS study released last Tuesday also ranked universities worldwide aged less than 50.
In the latest Times ranking, universities were compared on a list of 13 performance indicators grouped into five areas: research, teaching, citations, international outlook and industry income.
Mr Phil Baty, editor of the Times Higher Education rankings, told The Straits Times that NTU has been one of the world's "biggest risers".
It improved in all five areas, with the highest scores in industry income and international outlook.
Industry income refers to the amount of funding a school attracts from industry players while international outlook is its ability to draw a global mix of students and academic staff.
"NTU has been very active on the engineering front, as it works with big companies like Rolls-Royce and draws investment from business players," he said. "It also attracts top global talent in faculty, researchers and students."
An NTU spokesman said of the latest ranking: "Investment in research and education has made an impact and we are now reaping the rewards."
He added that NTU has a "strong track record of collaborations with leading industry partners around the world". In the past year, for example, it sealed new partnerships with car company BMW Group and aircraft maker Lockheed Martin.
The category's top three universities, in that order, are: South Korea's Pohang University of Science and Technology, Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
To capture the characteristics of younger universities, less emphasis is placed on reputation in the Times survey.
Reputation is reduced to one-fifth of the overall score compared with one-third in the Times magazine's annual World University Rankings, which comes out in October.
In the QS ranking, academic reputation takes up 40 per cent of the overall score.
With less weighting on reputation, the Times ranking is a way of "spotting future talent", said Mr Baty.
