Five Spanish universities – Barcelona, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Granada, Valencia and the Complutense University of Madrid – appear this year among the 200 best in the world in the Shanghai “ranking”, considered the most prestigious worldwide classification of college campuses.
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), better known as the Shanghai classification, has been published since 2003 and is updated every year by the Jiao Tong University, located in that Chinese city. The campuses are ordered one by one up to number one hundred and from there they do it by blocks.
In this 2022 edition, Harvard tops the ranking list for the 20th year, Stanford remains in second place , and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) climbs to third position in this edition.
Other “top 10” campuses are Cambridge (4th), Berkeley (5th), Princeton (6th), Oxford (7th), Columbia (8th), Caltech (9th), and Chicago (10th).
In Europe , the University Paris-Saclay (16th) remains in the best position, followed by ETH Zurich (20th), while in Asia the University of Tokyo (24th) leads this “league”.
The academic list classifies the centers according to the number of articles published in scientific journals -especially in Nature and Science- , the performance “per capita” with respect to the size of the institution or the number of Nobel Prize winners who have studied there or teach classes.
In this edition, Spain has five universities among the 200 best in the world , one more than in 2021, with the University of Barcelona standing out for another year as the only one that manages to rank in the bracket that goes from position 151 to 200.
Immediately after, between the 201st and 300th best campuses in the world, are the Autonomous University of Barcelona , the Complutense University of Madrid , Granada and Valencia .
Among the Spanish universities that improve with respect to the classification obtained in 2021, the University of Valencia stands out, making a leap by going from the 301-400 bracket to that of 201-300, and the same thing happens to the Pompeu Fabra , which passes from position 401-500 to the range from 301 to 400.
In this aspect, the improvement registered by the Pablo de Olavide University of Seville stands out, which in 2022 is among the 601-700 best higher education centers worldwide (801-900 in 2021).
At the other extreme, with falls in their academic evaluation compared to the previous year, are the Polytechnic of Valencia , the Polytechnic of Salamanca , the Polytechnic of Madrid , the Rovira i Virgili and the universities of the Balearic Islands and Las Palmas de Gran Canary .
As a novelty in relation to 2021, the Cádiz campus (901-1000) and the Miguel Hernández University of Elche (801-900) appear in this edition.
