This year, in the QS World University Rankings 2019, three Dutch universities have managed to make it into the top 100! Last year, only two had this honour.
The QS World University Rankings are published annually and this year marks their 15th edition. The ranking is considered to be one of the most important international educational rankings in the world.
Universities are assessed according to six metrics, which are unequally weighted:
Academic reputation, at 40% of the total score, weighs heavier than any of the other metrics. This metric is evaluated via an academic survey, which gathers the opinions of over 80.000 people in the area of higher education regarding the quality of research and teaching at world universities.
Faculty / student ratio and citations per faculty each make up for 20% of a university’s score. Employer reputation accounts for 10% of the final score and is also measured by a survey; the world’s largest employer survey, in fact.
The survey, used to evaluate universities according to the employer reputation metric, asks employers to indicate the institutions from which they find the most competent, innovative and effective graduated. This survey received over 40.000 responses. The ratios of international faculty and international students each contribute 5% to the final score.
Three Dutch universities are ranked in the top 100 this year. Delft University of Technology comes in two places higher than in 2018, finishing at number 52. The University in Delft is, yet again, the best university in the Netherlands, according to the ranking.
Finishing second in the Netherlands and 57th overall is the University of Amsterdam, which climbs one place compared to the previous year. Delft performed particularly well on the metrics of international faculty ratio and citations per faculty, as did Amsterdam. Although Delft places higher, Amsterdam received a higher score on the metric of academic reputation.
The last university in the Netherlands to place in the top 100 on the 2019 ranking is Eindhoven University of Technology. Eindhoven moved up five places this year to make it into the top and scored extremely well on international faculty ratio as well as citations per faculty.
Not all the universities in the Netherlands made the top 100; however, here are all the Dutch universities which were included in the ranking and their positions.
| NL rank | Institution | Global rank |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Delft University of Technology | 52 |
| 2 | University of Amsterdam | 57 |
| 3 | Eindhoven University of Technology | 99 |
| 4 | University of Groningen | 120 |
| 5 | Leiden University | 122 |
| 6 | Utrecht University | 124 |
| 7 | Wageningen University | 125 |
| 8 | University of Twente | 172 |
| 9 | Erasmus University Rotterdam | 179 |
| 10 | Radboud University | 204 |
| 11 | Maastricht University | 211 |
| 12 | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | 231 |
| 13 | Tilburg University | 319 |
In this year’s edition of the QS World University Rankings, the top ten is dominated by American and English universities. The only university in the top not from these countries is ETH Zurich- Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. The top ten universities in the world can be seen in the following video from Top Universities.