UvA moves up five places in the new QS ranking
The UvA ranks 53rd in the world ranking by the British research firm QS. Last year, it was at position 58. Almost all other Dutch universities have also gained ground. One of the reasons is that the creators of the rankings have changed their methods.
For the first time, sustainability is a topic in the QS World University Rankings. Among other things, the creators look at whether universities contribute to the United Nations’ 17 sustainability goals. It is not just about climate, but also things like social equality and the fight against poverty. The score on sustainability weighs in five percent.
Reputation
The most important criterion in the rankings remains the university’s reputation among scientists and employers, but that balance has shifted. Scholars now carry less weight (30 rather than 40 percent), while employers’ opinions receive more emphasis (15 percent instead of 10 percent).
Other criteria include the internationalization of staff and students, citation scores of scholarly articles, the number of students per instructor, and students’ job performance.
There are few changes at the top. The American university MIT is at the top for the 12th time and the British University of Cambridge is number two, as it was last year. Oxford now gets the bronze, followed by the American universities Harvard and Stanford.
Netherlands
But almost all Dutch universities climbed up a few places. This time the Delft University of Technology penetrated the top 50 at number 47. The University of Amsterdam achieved the 53rd spot.
Six Dutch universities rank somewhere between number 100 and 200 on the list. So does Wageningen, the only one of them to lose ground. The green university dropped from 124 to 151.
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Criticism
There are other world rankings in circulation, such as the Shanghai Ranking and the British Times Higher Education rankings. They all take a slightly different approach. The criticism of such rankings is that they create their own reality; how big are these differences really? And why is basic research that makes it into international journals by definition more valuable than research into, say, the earthquakes in Groningen?
In addition, institutions sometimes adopt questionable policies to move up the lists. A university in Saudi Arabia paysscientists to say they work there so that their reputation counts towards the ranking of that university.
The scoring is also not always completely explicable. In the area of sustainability, for example, the Delft University of Technology scored 98 out of 100 points, while the Eindhoven University of Technology got stuck at 18 points.
So there are often calls to ignore these rankings. At the same time, others say that these rankings do say something about the good position of Dutch universities in the world.
Two camps
These two opinions are also expressed by the universities’ association UNL. On its page on rankings, it summarizes the criticism: “A ranking paints an incomplete picture of reality. The strength of higher education institutions is, pre-eminently, their mutual diversity. The pitfall of rankings is that they paint a global picture that does (too) little justice to the complexity of what is being measured.”
“Nevertheless, an external benchmark can be a valuable tool,” the association adds. “However, it is important to remember that no ranking is completely objective and that the final ranking is the result of the many subjective choices made by the creators.”
