Only four Romanian universities have been included in the 2016/17 QS World University Ranking, which features just over 900 of the top universities in the world. However, Romania does better than last year, when two similar rankings included only two, respectively three local universities.

The Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi, Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, the University of Bucharest, and the West University of Timisoara are the four Romanian schools included in the ranking. All four of them are in the 701+ category, which is the last category in the top.

Three U.S universities are the best in the world, according to the QS ranking, namely the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, and Harvard University. They are followed by Great Britain’s University of Cambridge, American California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Great Britain’s University of Oxford, and UCL (University College London).

In Europe, Great Britain has the best universities: the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and UCL (University College London).

In the region, neighboring Bulgaria has only one University in the ranking, namely the Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. However, the school is ranking better than the Romanian universities, being in the 651-700 category.

Hungary on the other hand, has six universities in the QS ranking: the University of Szeged (in the 501-550 category), Eotvos Lorand University (601-650), University of Debrecen (651-700), and Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Corvinus University of Budapest, and University of Pecs (in the 701+ category).

Ukraine also has six universities on the list, with V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University being the best ranked (382nd), and so does Poland, with the University of Warsaw being the best ranked Polish university (366th).

The QS Rankings are based on six performance indicators, namely academic reputation (which has a share of 40%), employer reputation (10%), student-to-faculty ratio (20%), citations per faculty (20%), international faculty ratio (5%), and international student ratio (5%). Find the full 2016/17 rankings here.

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Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com