TU Delft #90 of most international universities

Rankings such as this can be important for universities wanting to attract international talent, because they are often consulted by international students and scholars. The THE conducts their annual rankings of universities based on different weighted factors. The most well-known list is the general ranking, which evaluates universities on research (30%), education (30%), citations (30%), internationalisation (7.5%) and income from industry (2.5%). For the 2015-2016 general ranking, TU Delft jumped to number 65, steadily climbing up from 151 in the last five years. And in the THE ranking of Engineering & Technology universities, TU Delft landed at number 19 in the world.

The most recent THE ranking, how-ever, focuses on just one of their core performance indicators, internationalisation. According to their website, the international outlook indicator considers three factors. The first two are the international-to-domestic student ratio and the international-to-domestic staff ratio. These reflect the ability of a university to attract undergraduates, postgraduates and faculty from around the world.

At present about 20% of TU Delft’s student population comes from abroad, with the majority of those being postgraduate students. Roughly 45% of paid employees are from other countries, and 23% of the total paid employee population comes from non-European countries. The third factor is international collaboration. For this, the THE calculates the proportion of a university’s total research journal publications that have at least one international co-author.

The top spot on the list this year went to Qatar University based on their international outlook indicator. And according to the ranking, the UK is the nation that does best overall in terms of internalization. But there are critics who say this type of ranking has flawed methodology.

For example, according to Wikipedia, in 2013 only 13% of the 1.8 million people in Qatar were actually Qatari citizens. That means the number of internationals far outweighs locals, so it’s no wonder they have a high percentage of internationals at the university. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are good at attracting foreign talent.

But the editor of the THE World University Rankings, Phil Baty, spoke to the value of these rankings on their website. “They are widely acknowledged as the gold standard in global university evaluation, and a powerful indicator of all-round excellence,” he said. Referring to the internationalisation data he said, “This table is simply a cut of the overall World University Rankings data, designed to encourage people to look beyond the composite scores, and drill down into the data.”

“It is my view that a university’s international outlook is key to its potential – universities are all about talent, so an ability to draw in talent from all over the world is vital,” he said.