Two Belgian universities are listed in the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), otherwise known as the Shanghai Ranking.
The university of Ghent comes in at number 66, unchanged from last year. The university’s total score was 28.9. compared to a maximum 100 scored by leader Harvard. Ghent comes top in the world, however, for veterinary sciences.
Lower down, the university of Leuven managed to squeeze into the top 100 at number 97, down from 85 last year. Leuven scores 25.9 points.
Other Belgian institutions feature lower down in the ranking. The Free University ULB in Brussels is in the tranche from 101 to 150, whereas last year it was in the lower section from 151 to 200.
Places outside the top 100 are differentiated only by section.
Eight Belgian universities make the top 1,000. As well as those already mentioned, they are: UCLouvain, 151-200; university of Liege, 201-300; Antwerp and Free University VUB, 301-400.
The university of Hasselt brings up the rear in the section 601-700.
Leading the pack are Harvard with a perfect score of 100, followed by Stanford, Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UCBerkeley. That order is unchanged since 2016, while the five universities concerned have held the top five places since the Shanghai Ranking began in 2003.
The top ten is completed by Princeton, Columbia, CalTech, Oxford and the university of Chicago. In all, eight US institutions and two from the UK. Paris-Saclay is the leading non-British/American university at 14, and the next is ETH Zurich at 20.
The US alone has 41 entries in the top 100, and the UK eight. Australia comes next with seven, and France with six.
The ARWU was first published in June 2003 by the Center for World-Class Universities (CWCU), of the Graduate School of Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Since 2009 the ranking has been published by ShanghaiRanking Consultancy.
ARWU uses six indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of highly cited researchers and the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science.
Alan Hope
The Brussels Times
