ETH Zurich remains among the best

This year, ETH has been placed 14th in the World University Ranking compiled by Times Higher Education (THE). It has dropped one place when compared with last year, but is still the best university outside of English-speaking countries. The universities of Oxford, Stanford and Harvard made up the top three this year.

ETH has achieved improvement in the “knowledge transfer” and “frequency of citations” indicators this year. The university also performed well for the criteria of “international outlook” and “teaching and research”, though its score did decline slightly in both. 

“ETH has seen positive developments in many of the individual metrics,” commented Paul Cross from ETH Institutional Research, in a university press release. However, “improved performance does not necessarily result in higher scores”. He highlighted that ETH had achieved a higher “research income to academic staff” ratio than last year.

Alongside ETH Zurich, four other universities in Switzerland made the top 100 list. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) was placed at 43, the University of Zurich (UZH) at 73, the University of Basel at 92 and the University of Bern at 100.

This year’s THE university rankings evaluated more than 1,500 universities across 93 countries and regions. They are based on 13 performance indicators, including the learning environment, research volume, income and reputation, research influence and international outlook.