According to the British World University Ranking 2024, eleven Dutch universities are among the best 200 in the world. Only Tilburg University is marginally outside that number.

A striking feature is the rise in the rankings of Delft University of Technology from 70th to 48th place, overtaking the University of Amsterdam (61) and Wageningen University (64), which was the highest-ranked Dutch university last year. TU/e (168) also rises significantly and is now back in the top 200, where it dropped out in 2021. The University of Twente (184) also entered the top 200.

Reservations

Utrecht University would certainly have featured in the rankings. Last year, it was the third-highest ranked Dutch university, in 66th place. But the university has decided not to give information to Times Higher Education anymore, according to the editorial team. So it is no longer taking part.

Utrecht University has not yet made a statement about it, but is certainly not the only institution that has reservations about this type of international rankings. A group of experts from Universities of The Netherlands (UNL) suggested this summer that they “claim incorrectly to be able to express the performance of a university, in the broadest sense, in a single figure”.

Cultural change

Furthermore, the rankings are allegedly at odds with the pursuit of ‘recognition and reward’. Universities no longer want to evaluate their staff only on the basis of publications in scientific journals (to which great importance is attached in the rankings), but also on the basis of skills such as teaching, leadership, team scienceand science communication.

“It’s important to be able to establish our position among the world’s best”, said former UNL chair Pieter Duisenberg, “but this method doesn’t do justice to the scope of the work carried out at universities.”

He hoped for a cultural change and was pleased “that the University of Twente, Leiden University, Maastricht University and VU Amsterdam want to take the initiative in this regard”. But for the time being, only Utrecht is turning words into action.

Oxford

The British and American universities still dominate the rankings. The University of Oxford is at number 1 for the eighth successive year, followed this time by America’s Stanford University, with Harvard at 4. Switzerland’s ETH Zürich is ranked 11th and the highest-ranked Chinese institution (Tsinghua University) has advanced to 12th place.