Tilburg big absentee in Times ranking
Tilburg is the only Dutch university not in the overall 2011-2012 world rankings of Times Higher Education (THE) magazine. Tilburg University ended somewhere between the 251 and 275th place.
12 Dutch universities are now represented in the top 200. As a result, The Netherlands hold third place worldwide after the U.S. and Britain: higher than ever.
Walter Verhoeven, spokesman for Tilburg University, said in daily newspaper De Volkskrant that Tilburg scored poorly in the rankings because mainly the medical and science subjects were compared. “We are always strong in rankings that only compare economics sciences, like recently in the Shanghai Rankings. For us this is simply the wrong league.”
According to Phil Baty, editor of THE magazine, that is not the case. “We have done everything to also weigh social sciences and economics equally.” The other Dutch universities actually climbed in the rankings by a more sophisticated measurement method.
The Times Higher Education rankings capture the full range of university activities, from teaching to research to knowledge transfer and internationalization. It measures staff-student ratio, the number of citations and industry income. Also, a large number of academics were asked to review the reputations of universities. The Shanghai index only measures research performances.
See the positions of Dutch universities in 200 World University Rankings below. Last year not a single Dutch university appeared in the top-100.
68. Utrecht
75. Wageningen
79. Leiden
92. Universiteit van Amsterdam
104. Delft
115. Eindhoven
134 Groningen
157. Rotterdam
159. Radboud, Nijmegen
159. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
197 Maastricht
200. Twente
251-257. Tilburg
