Two Belgian universities made it into the top 100 universities in the world in the latest edition of the annual Shanghai ranking, published on Friday.
The ranking, officially known as the Academic Ranking of World Universities, ranks more than 2,500 universities worldwide and publishes the top 1000 results. It is widely cited, despite some criticism of its methodology.
The top 10 remains exclusively occupied by American and British universities, with Harvard ranking first, followed by Stanford and MIT. The universities of Cambridge and Oxford in the UK are ranked fourth and sixth respectively.
The leading university in continental Europe is Paris-Saclay, in 13th place. Paris-Saclay is a new kid on the block, having been established in 2019 with the merger of four technical grandes écoles, and several technological institutes and engineering schools.
Belgium’s largest university, KU Leuven, is placed at 76th in the ranking, rising two places from its 2024 ranking. The university ranked highly in dentistry and oral sciences (17th globally), communication (17th globally), public administration (19th globally) and medical technology (33rd globally).
Earlier this year, KU Leuven jumped from 63rd to 60th place in the prestigious QS World University ranking.
Ghent University also made it into the top 100 in the Shanghai Ranking. It was place at 91 - down one place from last year's ranking. Ghent ranked sixth in the world for veterinary sciences and 21st for biotechnology.
The Shanghai ranking takes into account six criteria, including the number of Nobel Prizes and Fields Medal - considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics - among graduate students and professors, the number of most-cited researchers in their discipline, and the number of publications in the journals Science and Nature. These criteria, based on research and not on training, fuel some of the criticism of this list.
