UW lands at No. 25, fourth among U.S. public institutions, in Times Higher Education world ranking

Victor Balta UW News

The University of Washington landed at No. 25 on the Times Higher Education world rankings for 2017, released this week. The UW is fourth on the list among U.S. public universities, behind UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Michigan. Great Britain’s University of Oxford is ranked No. 1, with the U.S.’s Cal Tech and Stanford ranked second and third.

“These are the world’s best universities ranked according to criteria that make a lot of sense,” said UW President Ana Mari Cauce. “It is heady company to be in, especially among our peer public universities in the U.S. It reflects the world-class work of our faculty and their students and is a telling sign of how good they really are. We’re very proud of them.”

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings judge research-intensive universities across all their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. The rankings 13 performance indicators to provide comprehensive and balanced comparisons that they say are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments. The UW moved up from No. 32 in 2016’s ranking to No. 25.

The performance indicators are grouped into five areas: teaching (the learning environment, primarily based on a reputation survey); research (including the number of papers published in the academic journals); citations (research influence, including the number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally); international outlook (including the university’s ability to attract students and faculty from around the world); and industry income (knowledge transfer in terms of a university’s ability to help industry with innovations, inventions and consultancy).

The THE ranking comes on the heels of the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities, conducted by researchers at the Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which was released last month and ranked the UW No. 15.