UvA rises to spot 60 in world Times Higher Education rankings
The UvA has risen five places in the annual world rankings of the British magazine Times Higher Education: from place 65 to place 60. The University of Utrecht, TU Delft and the University of Groningen also climb on the list.
The world ranking looks at 1,799 universities in 104 countries and territories and roughly rates universities in four areas: teaching, research, knowledge exchange and international standing. Within those areas, it looks at factors such as number of students per teacher, number of publications and collaborations with business.
Topping the list for the seventh year in a row is the British University of Oxford, followed by the American Harvard. A shared third place is for Cambridge University (United Kingdom) and Stanford University (United States).
The Dutch leader is Wageningen in position 59. That is six places lower than last year. According to the British ranking, ten Dutch universities are still among the best two hundred in the world. Only five countries have more: the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Australia and - for the first time - China.
Rankings are regularly criticized because of the criteria: internationalization of staff and students, for example, is considered a plus, while here in the Netherlands there is also criticism of the unbridled influx of foreign students and the Englishification of education. Furthermore, the "citations" of scientific articles weigh thirty percent of the score. Thus, researchers are judged on articles that score well among peers. The use of these citation scores is now meeting with considerable resistance.
