Alumni engagement and philanthropy
QUEEN'S IMPROVES ON ITS WORLD UNIVERSITY RANKING 
21 June 2019
Queen's University Belfast's position in the world university rankings has risen from 180 to 173 in the 2020 assessment by QS World University Rankings, released on Wednesday 19 June.
The rise in ranking enjoyed by Queen's this year contrasts with the overall trend in UK universities, which has seen 56 of the 84 participating universities drop at least one place.
Commenting on Queen's rankings progress, Professor Richard English, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Internationalisation and Engagement, said: "Queen's enhanced performance in the QS World University Rankings 2020 is a testament to the hard work being carried out across the institution.
“In such a competitive global Higher Education sector, it is rewarding to know that our stock is rising internationally.
"Indeed, our new ranking – Queen's best performance in these rankings in the last five years – provides an opportunity for us to reflect on, and celebrate, the fact that we are an international university.
"I would like to thank all our staff who have helped us achieve this rankings rise. In particular, I would like to pay tribute to our academic colleagues who have helped ensure an improvement in our academic reputation and citations per faculty."
Academics and employers are surveyed to create an overall picture of 1,000 universities from 82 different locations, based on six key metrics:
• Academic reputation
• Employer reputation
• Faculty/student ratio
• Citations per faculty
• International faculty ratio
• International student ratio
The highest weighting of any metric (40%) is allotted to an institution’s Academic Reputation. Based on its Academic Survey, QS collates the expert opinions of over 94,000 individuals in the higher education sector regarding teaching and research quality at the world’s universities and as such is an unparalleled means of measuring sentiment in the academic community.
The Employer Reputation metric is based on almost 45,000 responses to the QS Employer Survey – the world’s largest of its kind – and asks employers to identify those institutions from which they source the most competent, innovative, effective graduates.
The new list sees the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) named as the number one university in the world for a record seventh year in a row while the University of Oxford continues its reign as the best in the UK. Trinity College Dublin – the top university in Ireland – is ranked just outside the Top 100 at joint 104th.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Find out more about the QS World University Rankings 2020 and the methodology used here.
Back to Main News
Top of Page