It places eleven centers in the ‘top 500’, the lowest figure in four years, yet eight out of ten public campuses remain among the top thousand on the planet. The universities of Elche and Cádiz returned this year to the select club of the Shanghai ranking
Spanish universities have practically revalidated the magnificent international valuation that they achieved in both 2019 and 2020. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), prepared as every year by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, today awarded the educational centers superior Spanish its second best historical ranking among the world elite, led for another year (nineteenth consecutive) by the American Harvard.
This list of the 500 best universities in the world, known as the Shanghai ranking, the oldest, most prestigious and influential classification, includes twelve Spanish higher education centers in its select club in 2021, one less than in 2019 and 2020, but two more than three years ago. Spain remains very close to the historical maximum of thirteen campuses in 2015 and 2020 and, in addition, maintains a quarter of its public centers among the academic elite of the planet. This is a good result, which equals that of 2016 and improves on those of the following two years, when Spanish universities lost one center per course in the “top 500”.
However, as has been the case since the first edition of the study (2003), there are no Spaniards among the top one hundred and only the University of Barcelona is capable of placing itself between positions 150 and 200, a feat in view of its resources that it has maintained since 2014, with a single puncture in 2017. The reason that distances the national campuses from the top positions is that the Shanghai ranking essentially values very high-level research (especially scientific and technical) above teaching and premium with up to 30% score to universities with students and professors in possession of the Nobel Prize or the Fields Medal (Mathematics), which Spain lacks.
Spain has a rather modest presence in the elite, but is instead a powerhouse among the higher education middle class. It has a high level of quality in the vast majority of its campuses. This is demonstrated by the second world ranking published by the Jiao Tong University, which defines the universities that occupy positions from 501 to 1,000 -the candidates to jump to the ‘top 500’ in the coming years-, which includes another 29 Spanish centers , two more than last year and its best record so far among the global university middle class.
The UMU, between 701-800
The extended list shows that 40 Spanish universities (all public except the University of Navarra, which includes the University of Murcia -UMU-) are among the 1,000 best in the world. The Spanish elite has been reduced this year to eleven centers, after the departure of the University of Salamanca.
The University of Barcelona is the only one between positions 150 and 200 and is followed by the Complutense University of Madrid, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the University of Granada and the University of Valencia, all of them between positions 201 and 300 (from position 99 they are only numbered by hundreds). In the next step, in the group of the 301 to 400 best, are the Autonomous University of Madrid, the University of the Basque Country and the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona. The UMU is located between positions 701 and 800, together with the Polytechnic of Catalonia and the universities of Lérida, Castilla-La Mancha, Jaén, La Laguna, Málaga and Oviedo.
The authors of the study consider that there are four main Spanish candidates to enter the ‘top 500’ in the coming years, which correspond to positions 501 to 600 on the complementary list. They are the recently descended University of Salamanca, the University of Zaragoza, the University of Navarra and the University of Vigo. The University of Almería (which had entered last year for the first time) leaves the list of the thousand best campuses and the University of Cádiz and the Miguel Hernández University of Elche return to the world elite, who had fallen in the sieve last year .
Harvard, immovable
The top ten positions in the Shanghai ranking are dominated by the eight main American universities, with Harvard and Stanford in the lead, and by the two illustrious British universities, Cambridge, which drops to fourth place, and Oxford (seventh). There is no possibility of finding a campus that does not belong to one of these two countries until position 16, where the Paris-Saclay University is located. The University of Tokyo is the first Asian, in 24th place, and the Australian University of Melbourne, in 32nd, is the first in Oceania.
America’s dominance among the world’s best universities is overwhelming. In the ‘top 20’ of centers monopolizes 16 (the same as last year); in the ‘top 100’ it has 40 (one less); and in the global top 500, 127 (two fewer). They are followed as university powers by China, with 83 centers among the top 500 (one less), and the United Kingdom, with 38 campuses, eight of them in the ‘top 100’.
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