Two Hungarian Higher Education Institutions on the Shanghai Ranking List Again

Since 2003, the Shanghai Jiao Tong Institution for Higher Education has compiled ranking lists including a number of higher education institutions worldwide by several aspects, most of which are indicators of scientific achievement. The international ranking list is covered by nearly all the online and printed press, as it is one of the best known lists in Hungary, and several Hungarian universities have been included. Let's see how Hungarian higher education institutions have performed in 2008!

In 2008, the first ten places of the world ranking list were taken by eight US and two British universities. Similarly to previous years, the first place was taken by Harvard University, which was followed by Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley took third place. Although the majority of the listed institutions are from the US and Western Europe, a number of institutions from Eastern Europe were also ranked. The list of countries running the world's best higher education institutions included Poland - thanks to the Jagiellonian University and the Warsaw University -, the Czech Republic - on account of the place taken by the Charles University of Prague -, as well as Hungary.

In the past few years Hungary was mostly represented by the University of Szeged and the Eötvös Loránd University in the "Shanghai" list, however, in 2004 three higher education institutions took places in the rank, the third one being the Budapest University of Technology (BME). The former two institutions tied in 2008; they took places 303-401 in the world ranking list, and places 125-168 in regional competition.

This list specifically builds on scientific achievement, and puts high emphasis on past scientific performances, working with indicators that are easy to grasp for a wider audience: the decisive aspects are the quality of education, the quality of faculty, research performance and the size of the institution. The quality of education is measured by the number of Nobel Prizes and Field Medals, while the quality of the faculty is measured by the number of publications in prestigious international journals and the citation index in the first place.

Principles of Ranking and Scores Achieved by Hungarian Institutions

Source: www.arwu.org