UK dominates ranking of globally-focused universities
By David Jobbins – 14 January 2016
The United Kingdom has emerged as the country with the most-internationally focused universities in the world – with Australia a distant second and the United States hardly featured.
The 2016 Times Higher Education list of the 200 most international universities in the world, published last week, is headed by Qatar University, founded in 1973 in the oil-rich Gulf state.
The University of Luxembourg is in second place, with the University of Hong Kong third and the University of Macau sixth.
Four of the top 10 are Swiss universities, supporting a common thread of universities with faculty and students drawn from outside the country’s borders – École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in fourth place (after topping the table in 2015), University of Geneva (fifth), ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (seventh), and the University of St Gallen (eighth).
The National University of Singapore is ninth and Imperial College London tenth.
Phil Baty, Times Higher Education World University Rankings editor says: “An institution’s global outlook is one of the key markers of a prestigious university.
“The top institutions hire faculty from all over the world, attract students from a global market of top talent and collaborate with leading departments wherever they happen to be based.
“All institutions in this list deserve to celebrate – being named one of the most international universities in the world is a sign of great potential, competitiveness and dynamism.”
The US, which features relatively poorly in the rankings because its students and faculty are much more “home-grown”, manages only one university – Massachusetts Institute of Technology – in the Top 100 and then only in 90th place. There are only eight more in the lower half of the ranking.
Princeton (123rd) is the next highest, followed by Harvard (134th). Only six more US universities make the cut – Stanford (141st), Columbia (156th), the Georgia Institute of Technology (166th), Johns Hopkins (177th), Rice (193rd) and Purdue (196th).
The ranking is compiled using the results of the international outlook indicator in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2015-16. All the institutions that feature in the overall 2015-16 top 800 have been considered, up from a pool of 400 institutions last year.
There are 64 UK institutions in the top 200 – almost half of the UK’s total number of universities.
The University of Oxford and University College London (=18th), King’s College London (20th) University of Essex (21st), the London School of Economics and Political Science (22nd), Queen Mary University of London (23rd) and Queen’s University Belfast (24th) make the Top 25.
Australia has 24 universities in the top 200, 16 of them in the top 100. The Australian National University is highest placed at 25th.
Switzerland is third of the 28 countries listed, with 10 universities, including École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne which dropped to fourth place after heading the table in 2015.
New Zealand has six universities in the top 100, headed by Auckland University of Technology in 12th place. Canada, Denmark and Ireland have three universities each in the top 100.
Source: http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20160113211837319