The QS World University Rankings 2022 feature two Dutch universities in the top 100, with the University of Amsterdam (UvA) ranked 55th in the world and listed as the number one university in the Netherlands. 

QS World University Rankings 2022

Published earlier this month, this year marks the 10th edition of the annual QS World University Rankings. Featuring 1.300 institutions from around the world, each university is assessed according to six key metrics, listed below in order of weighting:

• Academic Reputation
• Faculty/Student Ratio
• Citations per Faculty
• Employer Reputation
• International Faculty Ratio
• International Student Ratio

At 40 percent of the total score, Academic Reputation is evaluated via an academic survey, which gathers the opinions of over 80.000 people in the area of higher education regarding the quality of research and teaching at world universities. The QS Employer Survey - the largest of its kind - is used to determine an institution’s Employer Reputation.

For the 10th year in a row, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) nabbed the top spot, achieving a score of 100 out of 100 in five out of the six metrics:

1. MIT (100)
2. University of Oxford (99,5)
3. Stanford University (98,7)
4. University of Cambridge (98,7)
5. Harvard University (98)
6. California Institute of Technology (97,5)
7. Imperial College London (97,3)
8. ETH Zurich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (95,4)
9. UCL (95,4)
10. University of Chicago (94,5)

Is UvA the best university in the Netherlands?

A total of 13 Dutch universities feature in this year’s rankings, but only two of them managed to secure a spot in the top 100: UvA and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). 

Since 2012, UvA has managed to consistently be named one of the top-65 universities in the world, improving its position in the latest ranking by rising from last year’s very respectable 61st place. UvA received an average score of 73,8 out of 100, performing best in the Citations per Faculty and International Faculty Ratio metrics (99,5 and 88,7 respectively). UvA’s poorest score came in the Faculty/Student Ratio category (33,6).

TU Delft, on the other hand, saw its potion hold steady this year after dropping from 50th place to 57th last year. Similarly to UvA, Delft’s top scores came for International Faculty Ratio (100), Employer Reputation (87,9), and Citations per Faculty (87,8), and while its lowest score was also for Faculty/Student Ratio, here TU Delft did perform better than UvA (41,8). The university achieved an overall score of 73,1.

Nine Dutch universities in the top 200

The QS World University Rankings 2022 judge Dutch universities slightly harsher than the most recent THE World University Rankings, which included seven Dutch universities in the top 100. However, a fairly respectable nine make it into QS' top 200:

• 55. University of Amsterdam (73,8)
• 57. Delft University of Technology (73,1)
• 110. Utrecht University (57,5)
• 112. Leiden University (57)
• 123. Wageningen University & Research (55,8)
• 125. Eindhoven University of Technology (55,3)
• 128. University of Groningen (54,8)
• 179. Erasmus University Rotterdam (46,3)
• 189, University of Twente (45,5)
• 209. Vrije Universitiet Amsterdam (42,6)
• 220. Radboud University (41,1)
• 233. Maastricht University (39,8)
• 356. Tilburg University (31)