Utrecht University and Leiden University have both made it into the 2012 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU, also known as Shanghai), an annual global university ranking prepared by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Utrecht University is the best research university in the Netherlands according to the prestigious annual ranking, sharing 12th place in Europe and 53rd place worldwide. UU has been the best ranking Dutch university since the ARWU ranking began in 2003. Leiden University is the other Dutch university in the Top 100. UU has fallen five places to 53rd in this year’s Top 100 and Leiden has fallen eight places to 73rd.

Harvard University remains the top university in the world for the tenth year in a row. The Top 10 universities in order are: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Caltech, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford. ETH Zurich in Switzerland is the highest ranking university in continental Europe at 23rd place overall, followed by Paris-Sud (37th) and Pierre and Marie Curie (42nd) in France.

The ARWU ranking is the leading system worldwide for ranking the quality of research universities. Of the 1200 universities considered this year, the best 500 are published online.

The ARWU considers every university that has any Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists, Highly Cited Researchers, or papers published in Nature or Science, as well as universities with significant amount of papers indexed by Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).

Universities included for consideration are ranked by several indicators of academic or research performance, such as alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, papers published in Nature and Science, papers indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution.

For your information, to be eligible to work as a highly skilled migrant in the Netherlands, if you do not have a degree from a Dutch university, you can also have a degree from a highly ranked university elsewhere, as judged by The AWRU and/or the Times Higher Education list; these are the only two rankings used as references for this purpose.