The Universitat Politècnica de València and the Universitat de València are positioned among the top 400 higher education institutions in the world, ranking 301 to 400 in the Shanghai ranking, where the University of Alicante is between 601 and 700.
On the other hand, the University of Barcelona is again, for the sixth year, among the top 200 in the world, the only Spanish university to achieve this, according to the 2021 Shanghai ranking, in which eleven other academic institutions in the country managed to position themselves among the top 500 in higher education.
In total, twelve of the country’s universities are among the top 500, one less than in 2020. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), known as the Shanghai ranking and the most recognised worldwide, has been carried out by Jiao Tong University every year since 2003. The campuses are ranked one by one up to number 100 and then in blocks.
Among the indicators it uses to rank 2,000 institutions annually (although it only publishes the top 1,000 every 15 August) are the number of students and staff who win Nobel prizes and Fields medals (Mathematics), the number of articles published in scientific journals and the impact of their research.
In 2021, Harvard University tops the world list for the 19th consecutive year, followed by Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Berkeley, Princeton, Oxford, Columbia, Caltech and Chicago.
Within Europe, the University of Paris-Saclay ranks first, with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in second place. In Spain, only the University of Barcelona is in the top 151-200 best higher education institutions in the world.
The ranking places the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Granada in the range 201-300. In 2020 it also included the University of Valencia, but in this latest edition it falls to the next bracket between the 301-400 best centres.
Along with the Autonomous University of Madrid, the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of the Basque Country share the same status, and, unlike last year, the Pompeu Fabra University has dropped down the ranking.
In this way, the Catalan centre now occupies a place among the 401-500 best in the world, a ranking it shares with the universities of Salamanca (which rises from last year’s 701-800), Santiago and Seville (which remain the same), and the universities of Oviedo (now among the 701-800 best) and Zaragoza (now among the 501-600) disappear from here.
Zaragoza is joined in this block by the following academic institutions: the Polytechnic University of Madrid, the University of Navarra, the University of Vigo and the Rovira y Virgili University (Tarragona).
