All Dutch universities have gone down in the QS World University Rankings this year. The UG drops seventeen places, ending up in 145th place.
This is the university’s lowest place since 2012. In 2014-2015, the university was in ninetieth place, but it hasn’t been in the top hundred since 2016-2017. That’s the year QS decided it would only count the number of citations per faculty rather than the number of citations for an entire university.
Top 100
Even though all Dutch universities have gone down in the rankings, two remain in the top hundred: the University of Amsterdam (58th place) and the Delft University of Technology (61st place). According to the list’s makers, the main reason the Dutch universities are falling in the ranks is due to the factor ‘employer’s reputation’. Universities lose an average of seventy-seven places due to this factor.
As usual, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is at the top of the list, followed by Cambridge University. According to the researchers, this year’s list is the longest one so far; a total of 1,418 institutes spread over one hundred locations are included in the rankings.
Reputation
The annual list is based on six factors. The universities’ reputation is an especially important one, which is measured by asking academics and employees to fill out questionnaires. QS also looks closely at internationalisation.
According to critics of the list, QS is too invested in universities’ reputation as a factor. On top of that, not everyone agrees that internationalisation is a good thing. Other critics feel that the ranking is arbitrary, because the factors it’s based on change regularly, which means results from different years can’t be compared to each other.