On Wednesday 12 October 2022, Times Higher Education (THE) released the results of the THE World University Rankings 2023, in which the University of Luxembourg now ranks among the top 250.
There were some mixed results for European universities this year, with top-ranked universities in France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Ireland all having lost ground. However, Italy boasted the ranking's best-performing newcomer, Humanitas University (201-250), and France, Switzerland and Germany all have had universities climb into the world top 100. Meanwhile, central and eastern Europe have gained ground, with Hungary and Estonia entering the world top 250, and Poland has improved its representation with nine new entries into the rankings.
Competition from Asia is heating up as the overall number of ranked universities from Asia (669 universities) now outnumbers that of Europe (639 universities).
"Europe is of course a thriving powerhouse of world-class higher education and research, but a significant shift in the balance of power in the knowledge economy has taken place, with Asian universities now outnumbering those from Europe in the overall Times Higher Education World University Rankings", commented Phil Baty, Chief Knowledge Officer at Times Higher Education. "Asia is the best represented continent in the Rankings, with 669 universities, compared to Europe's 639 and 234 in North America. In 2018, 38.4% of all ranked universities were from Europe, today it has dropped to 35.5%".
China had eleven universities in the top 200 for the first time and 95 universities overall in the 2023 rankings. Meanwhile, the number of United States universities represented in the top 100 continued to fall, from a peak of 43 in 2018, to 34 this year.
For its part, the University of Luxembourg climbed from the top 300 (251-300) in the THE World University Rankings 2022 to the top 250 (201-250) in this new edition.
A record number of 1,799 universities from 104 countries and regions are included in the World Rankings this year (137 more than last year), making it the largest edition in the nineteen-year history of the rankings. The United Kingdom's University of Oxford retained the top spot for the seventh consecutive year.
The THE World University Rankings provide a rigorous overview of a university's quality, drawing on an analysis of 15.5 million research publications and 121 million citations to those publications, plus over 40,000 responses to an annual academic reputation survey and hundreds of thousands of additional data points covering a university's teaching environment, international outlook and industry links. Institutions are measured across thirteen separate performance metrics, providing a comprehensive picture of excellence among world-class research universities.
The full list is available on the THE website: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2023.
