U-Multirank 2017 edition launches with new subjects and universities

The new U-Multirank edition 2017/18 has been published and this fourth round of the Union’s ranking showcases 1 500 institutions and over 100 000 student views. The new edition includes updates which advance U-Multirank’s core objective to accentuate institutional competences that in classical ranking methodologies might go unnoticed, and provide student and education stakeholders with the opportunity to evaluate universities on a wide and tailored range of parameters. This year features 16 subject rankings including four new subjects in: economics, chemical and civil engineering, as well as industrial engineering/production. To facilitate a wider array of comparisons at both the international and country level, this year’s data expand the number of US and UK universities. Since its 2014 launch, U-Multirank has been expanding year by year, and by now includes four times as many subjects, covers 99 countries and 10 000 study programmes, generating over 44 000 institutional and 65 000 subject performance scores, which makes it ‘’the largest global university comparison site’’.

Considering key results, Business Studies are found to be the most international discipline, attracting more globally mobile students and staff than any other field of study. Using the 2017/18 updated data U-Multirank has released two readymade rankings. The first zooms in on applied knowledge partnerships, showing institutions such as University of Deusto in Spain and Nuremberg Institute of Technology in Germany, to be top performers in transferring academic knowledge and research into practical and commercial benefits. Placing the focus on research and research linkages reveals alongside heavyweights as MIT and Harvard, smaller intuitions as high performers, including Hanken School of Economics in Finland, the UK based Institute of Cancer Research and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In this readymade ranking, which uses indicators as regional engagement and international orientation, institutions such as the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht, as well as the France-based Pierre & Marie Curie University, mark their excellence with six top scores out of a total seven indicators.

Evaluating the internationalisation of study programmes, U-Multirank also makes a contribution to institutions’ own assessment of internationalisation strategies and shows how students of different disciplinary backgrounds could benefit from universities with a global perspective. Doing away with league tables, as forgone editions, this year reconfirms that small and specialised institutions play a significant role in representing diversification in global centres of excellence.

U-Multirank 2017 edition – press release