With its placement among the leading 401–500 universities worldwide, the University belongs to the top quarter of the current THE World University Ranking. It is also pleasing for the University of Passau that it was able to improve on its overall score by over six percent compared to last year, aided in particular by a good performance in the areas of International Outlook and Research Quality. Factors that influenced these two were the fact that the University of Passau was able to attract more international students and academics from abroad in the latest period, while at the same time further increasing its research output, as measured by the number of publications in renowned journals and citations. For the first time, the ranking included Study Abroad as a factor – here the University of Passau scored 99.9 out of 100 possible points for its offers.
"For the seventh time in a row, our University is among the top 25 percent worldwide, which is an extraordinarily consistent top performance", said Professor Ulrich Bartosch, President of the University of Passau. "I am very pleased with this latest top result, which reflects the efforts of the entire university. Internationalisation and quality in research and teaching are strategic focal points of our university, and we have also concentrated on these in the new higher education accord 2023–27." He said that the fact that THE Ranking now gives us such positive feedback in these two fields in particular is both a confirmation and an incentive to continue successfully on the chosen path, adding: "I wish thank all members of our university community to whom we owe this success."
The University of Oxford (UK) defended its first place in the THE Ranking. Stanford University (USA) is ranked second, ahead of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). Harvard University (USA) and the University of Cambridge (UK) follow in 4th and 5th place. Only universities from the USA (7) and Great Britain (3) made it into the top 10. Close on their heels, in 11th place, is ETH Zurich, the front-runner among continental European universities. The top three German universities are the Technical University of Munich (30), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (38th) and Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (47th).
About the Times Higher Education Rankings
The THE World University Ranking is one of the most influential worldwide university rankings, which sees an increasing number of universities participating every year. The rankings are based on a comparison of 16 different indicators from the areas of research, teaching, knowledge transfer and internationalisation. Some of the data, in particular those on the student body, staff figures and financial resources, are reported by the participating universities themselves, while others are obtained from academic databases and THE-conducted surveys among international academics.