The University of Oxford in the United Kingdom has again topped the Times Higher Education World University Rankings as the best university in the world for a record eighth consecutive year.

The rankings released on Wednesday, September 27, 2023, rate 1,904 universities from 108 countries across the world.

Oxford was followed in the THE World Rankings 2024 by Stanford University in the United States and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the U.S. which placed second and third, respectively.

Harvard University in the U.S. and the University of Cambridge in the UK emerged fourth and fifth in the world, respectively.

Speaking, THE’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, Phil Baty, said: “In the World University Ranking’s 20-year history, no university has topped the ranking as consistently as the University of Oxford – the world’s number one for the eighth consecutive annual edition.

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“The achievement is based on true strength-in-depth, across all 18 performance indicators, covering the teaching environment, international outlook, and industry-links and Oxford especially shines out when it comes to outstanding, internationally impactful research.

“This year we have analysed the reach and influence of an unprecedented 16.5 million research outputs (with 134 million citations) in a new and richer set of research metrics and gathered the expert views of over 68,000 scholars across the word and all this comprehensive data finds that Oxford excels.

“Oxford first topped the global rankings in 2017 when fewer than 1,000 of the world’s research-intensive universities were evaluated. Today more than 2,000 submitted for assessment and we have seen dramatic progress from East Asian universities, particularly from China. Given this global long-term context, Oxford’s world leadership is even more remarkable.”

According to THE, this year’s rating considers 18 calibrated performance indicators measuring each university’s performance in five areas – teaching (the learning environment); research environment (volume, income, and reputation); research quality (citation impact, research strength, research excellence, and research influence); international outlook (staff, students and research); and industry (income and patents).

It stated that Oxford University excelled in all areas while strongly standing out in research environment and quality, teaching, and industry, based on how often a university’s research is cited in patents.

See the full list of top universities in the world here.

The Star