Seven Dutch universities in Times Top 100 ranking; Wageningen, Amsterdam lead

The university in Wageningen is the highest-ranked university in the Netherlands for the fourth year in a row. The university did drop in the rankings, while other Dutch universities climbed. As a result, Wageningen is no longer the solo leader in the Netherlands, but the university has become the leader of a Dutch platoon in the World University Rankings of Times Higher Education.

Last year, Wageningen University & Research rose from 62nd to 53rd place, twelve places higher than the next university. This year, Wageningen dropped to 59. Right behind it is the University of Amsterdam, which climbed from 65 to 60. The top 100 universities in the world also include Utrecht (from 69 to 66), Delft (from 75 to 70), Groningen (from 80 to 75), Leiden (from 71 to 77), and Erasmus University Rotterdam (from 72 to 80). The Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam dropped from 115 to 212. Radboud University Nijmegen remained in 139th, and Maastricht dropped from 127 to 145. Eindhoven, Tilburg, and Twente are not in the top 200.

The British University of Oxford is the best-rated university in the world for the seventh year in a row. Harvard in the United States came in second, and Cambridge and Stanford are a joint third. Also in the top 10 are MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Berkeley, and Yale in the U.S. and Imperial College in Great Britain. There were some shifts here and there, but broadly speaking, the picture looks the same as in previous years.

Lower on the list, there were some significant changes. Asia now has more universities on the ranking than Europe - 669 compared to 639. The top 20 includes three universities from Asia and one from the European mainland. Times Higher Education spoke of “a major shift in the balance of power in the knowledge economy.”

According to the British magazine, Europe has “an extraordinarily rich and diverse heritage of excellence, but it cannot afford to sit back. You have to run really fast to stand still in the world rankings. If you lose ground, there is a risk of a vicious circle through which you’ll eventually lose access to talent and collaborations.”

The Times Higher Education ranking is one of the most important international rankings for assessing universities’ performance. In the latest ranking, the magazine evaluated 1,799 universities in 104 countries and territories on various factors, including education, research, knowledge transfer, and international positioning.