Editor in chief at IamExpat Media
Last year saw something of an upset when Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) unseated the University of Amsterdam (UvA) to be crowned the best Dutch university by the QS World University Rankings. This year, TU has retained its title, despite slipping a couple of places down the list.
QS has released the 21st edition of its World University Ranking, a list of the best institutions for studying around the world. The 2025 edition features over 1.500 institutions, drawing on analysis of 17,5 million academic papers and the expert opinions of 240.000 university employees.
Each university was assessed across nine key metrics, each with its own weighting, to calculate an overall score:
For the 13th year in a row, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been named the best university in the world, with an overall score of 100 out of 100. Imperial College London and the University of Oxford rounded out the top three. ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the National University of Singapore were the only universities in the top 10 located outside of the US and the UK.
2024’s ranking saw Delft University of Technology take the place of the University of Amsterdam as the best university in the Netherlands. It has retained that position this year, coming in 49th overall (two places down since last year) and still inside the coveted top 50 in the world category. The biggest university in Amsterdam also slipped two places, coming in 55th overall.
Both universities put in a strong showing on their international outlook, with TU Delft securing a perfect 100 score on its international faculty ratio, and above 90 points on its international student ratio and international research network. TU Delft also scored a near-perfect 99,1 on sustainability. Its lowest score (39,4) was for faculty-student ratio.
According to the QS European University Rankings 2025, released just this week, Delft University of Technology is therefore the 15th best university in Europe, while University of Amsterdam is 17th.
It was just TU Delft and UVA that made it into the top 100 for the Netherlands, but overall 13 institutions were featured in the list, and eight made it inside the top 200, including the universities of Utrecht, Eindhoven, Leiden, Wageningen, Rotterdam and Groningen.
Compared to last year, only Utrecht University (up two places), Erasmus University Rotterdam (up 18 places), Tilburg University (up 24 places) and Maastricht University managed to improve their rankings. Maastricht managed the sharpest rise, moving from position 256 in 2024 to position 230 in 2025. The other Dutch universities all slipped slightly down the ranking.
Here is the position of all of the Dutch universities featured in the ranking:
For more information about the ranking, and to see how other universities around the world did, check out the QS website.
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