Three Dutch universities in top hundred

Three Dutch universities in top hundred

Three Dutch universities are among the world’s top hundred in the annual Shanghai Ranking. Utrecht University scores the highest with place 51. The Universities of Groningen and Rotterdam follow in places 75 and 87. TU Delft ranks somewhere between 151 and 200. Dutch laggard is Tilburg University somewhere between 700 and 800.

How many Nobel laureates do universities have, and how many winners of the Fields Medal in mathematics? That is what the makers of the annual Shanghai Ranking (officially: Academic Ranking of World Universities) take as their criteria. They also count how many articles have appeared in the journals Nature and Science in recent years. The makers also consider the number of highly cited researchers: researchers whose articles are among the one percent best cited in their field.

Just last month, Dutch universities announced that they attach less importance to such rankings because they erroneously summarise a university’s achievements in a single number. Moreover, rankings are at odds with the drive to ‘recognise and value’: the idea that employees should be given more appreciation for work that hardly counts in rankings: social impact, teaching, leadership and so on. You’re not going to win a Nobel Prize with an investigation into the earthquakes in Groningen or social safety in the Parliament. (HOP, Bas Belleman)