Oxford University Once Again Claims Top Spot in 2024 World University Rankings

University of Oxford has once again been ranked the top university in the world, according to Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

The university has been ranked as the best worldwide for eight years in a row, managing to maintain its position as first in the world since 2017, Erudera.com reports.

Stanford University secured the second position, while the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) placed third place in the rankings.

Other universities making the top ten list are:

• Harvard University
• University of Cambridge
• Princeton University
• California Institute of Technology
• Imperial College London
• University of California, Berkeley
• Yale University

“Eight years of leading the Times Higher Education world rankings is a testament to the impactful research we conduct that tackles some of the grand challenges facing people and the planet as well as the exceptional standards of teaching we deliver that will continue to inspire generations to come,” Vice-Chancellor Professor Irene Tracey said in a statement announcing the news.

This year, 18 calibrated performance metrics have been used to evaluate each university’s performance in five areas, such as

• Teaching
• Research environment
• Research quality
• International outlook
• Industry

Phil Baty, THE’s chief global affairs officer, said that in twenty years of World University Rankings, there hasn’t been any university that was ranked as consistently as the University of Oxford.

“This year we have analysed the reach and influence of an unprecedented 16.5 million research outputs (with 134 million citations) in a new and richer set of research metrics and gathered the expert views of over 68,000 scholars across the word and all this comprehensive data finds that Oxford excels,” Baty said.

According to the announcement, Oxford has also secured the top position in the inaugural European QS rankings, followed by ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the University of Cambridge, which secured the second and third spot, respectively.

THE World University Rankings 2023 include 1,799 universities in 104 countries and regions, meaning these rankings are the largest and most diverse so far.

Oxford University was established in 1096, and it is considered the second oldest university in the world, with a history of 922 years. The school enrolls more than 26,000 students, including 12,683 undergraduates and 13,324 postgraduates.

For the 2022/23 academic year, more than 37,500 students submitted applications to pursue an undergraduate degree in Oxford, all competing for just 6,056 postgraduate openings.