This year’s edition of the QS World University Rankings once again sees the University of Amsterdam (UvA) beat out other renowned institutions to be named the best university in the Netherlands. In all, seven Dutch universities managed to nab a place in the top 200.

QS World University Rankings 2023 

2023 marks the 11th edition of the annual QS World University Rankings, which features almost 1.500 institutions from around the world, assessed across six key indicators listed below in order of weighting:

• Academic Reputation
• Faculty to Student Ratio
• Citations per Faculty
• Employer Reputation
• International Faculty Ratio
• International Student Ratio

At 40 percent of the total score, Academic Reputation is evaluated via an academic survey, which gathers the opinions of over 130.000 people in higher education regarding the quality of research and teaching at world universities. The QS Employer Survey - the largest of its kind - is used to determine an institution’s Employer Reputation.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has, for the 11th consecutive year, nabbed the number one spot in the 2023 ranking, achieving the maximum possible score of 100 in five out of the six metrics. While the universities occupying the top 10 spots remain the same, there has been a slight reshuffle, with Cambridge climbing from fourth place to second, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland falling to ninth place.

University of Amsterdam once again named top Dutch university 

Once again, all 13 universities in the Netherlands feature in this year’s ranking, however only one can be named the best Dutch university, and this year that honour has once again been given to UvA. Since the ranking's inception, UvA has managed to consistently be named one of the top-65 universities in the world, although this year has seen the university’s position fall slightly, from 55th place in 2021 to 58th place with an overall score of 71,1 out of 100. 

The university - based, as its name suggests, in the city of Amsterdam - performed best in the Citations per Faculty and International Faculty Ratio metrics (97,3 and 92,3 respectively). UvA’s lowest scores came in the Faculty to Student Ratio and Employer Reputation categories (26,7 and 42,3 respectively). 

QS ranks 13 universities in the Netherlands

While two Dutch universities - UvA and TU Delft - manage to secure spots in the top 100, on the whole, all higher education institutions in the Netherlands saw their score fall slightly compared to 2021.

This year, only seven of the Netherlands’ 13 universities made it into the top 200, compared to last year’s nine. This year has also seen Wageningen University & Research replace Leiden as the fourth-best Dutch university:

• 58. University of Amsterdam (71,1)
• 61. Delft University of Technology (70)
• 112. Utrecht University (56,3)
• 124. Wageningen University & Research (54,6)
• 131. Leiden University (54,1)
• 138. Eindhoven University of Technology (52,7)
• 145. University of Groningen (51,4)
• 208. Erasmus University Rotterdam (42,5)
• 212, University of Twente (42,4)
• 214. Vrije Universitiet Amsterdam (42,3)
• 232. Radboud University (40)
• 278. Maastricht University (36,7)
• 398. Tilburg University (28,6)

For more information about the ranking, and to see how other universities around the world did, check out the QS website.