FAC RANKING 2023. As the start of the new school year approaches, the Shanghai ranking unveiled, this Tuesday, August 15, 2023, the best universities in the world. Discover all the classification in this article.
[Updated on August 15, 2023 at 2:18 p.m.] As every year at this time, the Shanghai ranking, which lists the 1000 best universities in the world, was published on Tuesday, August 15, 2023. At the top of the list, we witness the overwhelming presence American universities which occupy the podium (Harvard, Stanford, MIT) but also the vast majority of the top 10. French establishments have regained ground this year and are more likely to win in the first half of the ranking. This classification is based on a large number of criteria (see here).
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) is published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. Since its creation in 2003, Harvard University has always held first place. Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are generally not far behind.
Universities are ranked according to six criteria:
At the top of the ranking list, we find the American university of Harvard for the twenty-first consecutive year. The podium is exclusively American with the universities of Stanford and MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology) occupying second and third place respectively. The top 10 of the ranking is also largely dominated by American universities: Berkeley (5), Princeton University (6), Columbia (8), the California Institute of Technology (9) and the University of Chicago (10). Two British names nevertheless manage to interfere: the University of Cambridge which obtains the fourth place and the University of Oxford which takes the seventh place.
On the French side, universities have regained ground in the first half of the ranking, compared to 2022. Paris-Saclay is the first university in France to appear in the rankings. She obtains the fifteenth place and gains a place compared to last year. According to Le Figaro, “Shanghai’s thematic ranking has distinguished its mathematics department as the best in the world” since 2020. In the top 50, in forty-first place, we find Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) which brings together eleven establishments including Dauphine and the École Normale Supérieure (ENS). The Sorbonne loses three places and arrives in forty-sixth position. Four other French universities are present in the top 100, including Paris-Cité (formerly Descartes and Diderot) which made an impressive leap by gaining ten places and reaching the sixty-eighth position. In the ranking, we then find between places one hundred and three hundred the University of Grenoble Alpes, the University of Strasbourg, the University of Aix-Marseille, the University of Montpellier, the University Claude-Bernard Lyon 1 , the University of Bordeaux. If only twenty-seven French establishments are present in the total ranking this year (last year, it was about twenty-eight), France goes up in the list and obtains eighteen places in the top 500, i.e. two more than in 2022.
The QS World University Rankings are published annually by Quacquarelli Symonds, a British company that claims the world’s largest network of information and advice on higher education and career paths. In the 2023 ranking, for the twelfth consecutive year, it is the MIT or Massachusetts Institute of Technology that wins the prize.
This ranking is based on six weighted criteria: academic reputation (40%), reputation with recruiters (10%), teacher-student ratio (20%), number of citations per teacher-researcher (20%), the ratio of international teachers (5%) and that of international students (5%).
The London magazine Times Higher Education has published a world university ranking every year since 2004. He defines it as the only one to take into account the main missions of the university which are teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international influence. For this, 13 weighted indicators are used, grouped into five categories: the framework of work (30%), the number and scope of searches (30%), the influence of these searches (30%), the reputation in the international professors (7.5%), students and researchers and connections with companies (2.5%). As in other rankings, it is often the American universities that occupy the top of the table. However, the trend indicates that they are beginning to lose their panache in favor of Europeans. Thus, for the first time in 2015-2016, an establishment which is not Anglo-Saxon appeared in the top 10, the polytechnic school of Zurich, in Switzerland. Here are the French universities that have carved out a place in the famous Top 200 of the latest ranking (2022):
The Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) has been published since 2012 by King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It brings together the 1,000 best universities in the world according to eight criteria, such as the number of distinctions won by students, the number of former students with director positions or the importance of publications.
In 2022-2023, the top of the latest ranking is still occupied by American universities. Harvard University is ranked first (since 2012), followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford. It is then British establishments that complete the top 5: the University of Cambridge and that of Oxford. The top French university in the world ranking is Université PSL, in 19th place; followed by Université Paris-Saclay, in 32nd place; from the Sorbonne, in 38th place; from the University of Paris in 42nd place and from the Institut Polytechnique de Paris in 43rd place.
While Anglo-Saxon universities often steal the show from French establishments in world rankings, they nevertheless occupy permanent places in the rankings. Every year, there is great interest in international rankings such as the Shanghai ranking, the QS ranking, established by a British company or the CWUR ranking, published by a university in Saudi Arabia. Here is the rank of French establishments in these various rankings, within the limit of the top 200 establishments worldwide:
PSL University (Paris Sciences
