World University Rankings: Austria in Midfield at Best
Only seven Austrian institutions are among the world's top 1,000 universities in the 2020 ranking, of which the best only occupies 154th place.
QS World University Rankings 2020: Austria's top university, the Vienna University of Technology occupies the 154th spot. / Picture: © Wikimedia Commons / Peter Haas [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
This year's "QS World University Rankings" of the world's top 1,000 universities sees little upward movement among Austrian universities.
Although there are a total of 38 Austrian institutions in the list, only 7 of them appear in the main ranking, the "QS World University Rankings".
These include the following Austrian institutions:
1) University of Vienna #154
2) Vienna University of Technology #192
3) University of Innsbruck #266
4) Johannes Kepler University Linz #412
5) Karl-Franzens-University Graz #541-550
6) University of Klagenfurt #601-650
7) Paris Lodron University of Salzburg #751-800
The WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, for example, Austria's largest business university and Europe's largest university of its kind, and also currently the only AACSB- and EQUIS-accredited university in Austria, does not appear in the main ranking, but in various sub-categories such as the QS World University Rankings "By Subject Ranking", "Masters in Management" and "Masters In Finance".
This year’s ranking sees relatively little movement at the very top.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University and Harvard University are an unchanged top three, while the University of Oxford continues to be the best university in the UK.
However, outside of this good performance there are worrying signs for both the United States and the UK.
The majority of universities from both the US and UK have fallen in rank this year.
In most cases, this is because of a weaker score for international student ratio, one of the indicators used to compile the ranking.
According to QS Quacquarelli Symonds Limited, the publisher of the rankings, "Whether the impact of Donald Trump and Brexit is beginning to be felt or other factors are at play is unclear. However, it may not be long before other universities begin to overtake the traditional heavyweights from the UK and US."