Eight of twelve Dutch universities fall on Times ranking; TU Delft still the top
Eight of the twelve Dutch universities in the Times Higher Education world university rankings have fallen in the ranking. For the third year in a row, the Delft University of Technology is the Nehterlands’ highest ranking university in 57th place. Like last year, the Netherlands doesn’t have a single university in the top 50.
The authors of the ranking said that Dutch universities are slipping due to a decline in research quality and lower revenues. They expect the downward trend to continue as government budget cuts to education start to have a greater impact.
Radboud University Nijmegen has dropped 11 spots to 154th place - its worst position ever. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) dropped from 136th to 176th place.
The Netherlands still has five universities among the world’s top 100. TU Delft dropped from 56th to 57th place, and the University of Amsterdam dropped from 58th to 62nd. Wageningen University & Research moved up slightly, from 67th to 66th place. Leiden University also climbed the ranking, moving from 73rd to 70th. And the University of Groningen dropped from 80th to 82nd.
Erasmus University Rotterdam (107th), Maastricht University (131st), Radboud University Nijmegen (154th), VU Amsterdam (176th), University of Twente (190th), and Eindhoven University of Technology (192nd) are all in the top 200. And Tilburg University is in the top 350.
The Times Higher Education ranking is somewhat controversial in the Netherlands. The umbrella organization Universities of the Netherlands is critical of the ranking, arguing that the performance of educational institutions is very difficult to quantify. According to the organization, rankings like this one can lead to “arbitrary and questionable choices.”
Utrecht University has not provided data to this ranking for several years. The rankings place “too much emphasis on scoring and competition,” while Utrecht University considers collaboration and openness of scientific research to be more important, the university said in 2023, the first year that it did not appear in the ranking.
