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Copenhagen upstaged by DTU, Aarhus on Times ranking

Times' ranking disappoints again for University of Copenhagen

Going 20 places down since last year’s rankings, UCPH now takes the 150th place on the Times Higher Education World University Rankings with an overall score of 48.5. While it still got the most points for international outlook and citations, the results decreased in the areas of research and teaching.

The Times’ WUR ranking is one of four rankings that the University of Copenhagen benchmarks itself on, the others being QS, the Shanghai rank and the Leiden. Copenhagen traditionally scores around 50th place in the world on the QS ranking.
The Times’ WUR methodology tends to favour Anglo-American research-intensive institutions.

The biggest surprise for Denmark this year is the Technical University of Denmark that moved up 32 places to a joint 117th place with KTH Royal Institute of Technology, University of St Andrews and University of Glasgow. The title of the second best university in Denmark goes to Aarhus University that dropped 22 places to 138th, but still did better than UCPH.

The highest ranked university spot still belongs to the California Institute of Technology, which makes it the top university in the world for the third year in a row. University of Oxford was also able to sustain its second place, but this year it shares the spot with Harvard University that has moved up two places since last year. Swapping places with Harvard University is Stanford University that has been pushed down two spots to number four.

Bad news for Europe, Scandinavia’s safe

The overall trend shows alarming signs across Europe as the top universities in Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Russia, Belgium, the Republic of Ireland and Austria all goes down. The UK nevertheless remains Europe’s strongest representative, with 31 universities in the top 200.

Despite the major slip of European universities, Scandinavian universities managed to perform well as Sweden has five top 200 institutions, Denmark three, and Finland and Norway one. “Scandinavia’s strong commitment to the public funding of universities has obviously served its countries well in global competition,” says the editor of Times Higher Education Rankings Phil Baty. Two other Danish universities have made the list – University of Southern Denmark and Aalborg University – that are ranked between places 276 and 400.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings employs 13 separate performance indicators and examines universities by their four core missions – research, teaching, knowledge transfer and international activity. They are considered to be the most comprehensive and prestigious university ratings in the world.

universitypost@adm.ku.dk

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