Dear colleagues,
The Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2025 were published earlier today.
The University is ranked in the 201-250 ranking band globally, =26th in the UK and 4th in Scotland, which is the same as last year in all cases.
This ranking is based on five pillars, weighted as follows: Teaching (29.5%), Research Environment (29%), Research Quality (30%), Industry (4%) and International Outlook (7.5%). Each of these pillars is made up of several sub-metrics.
Maintaining our ranking needs to be seen in the context of the wider trend noted by the Times Higher that ‘the reputation of the UK sector is rapidly eroding’. The reputation surveys conducted by Times Higher account for 33% of the ranking (18% for Research, as part of the Research Environment pillar and 15% for Education as part of the Teaching pillar) and we have seen a decline in both metrics, although only a marginal decline in research reputation.
Areas of strength and improvement
The University continues to perform exceptionally well on International Outlook (8th in the UK, 18th in the world and first in Scotland), and this has been a consistent pattern for several years, being in the top 10 in the UK for each of the past eight years.
The University has also consistently been ranked in the top 10 in the UK for the Industry Pillar (9th this year). Our global ranking has, however, fallen from 277th to 330th. This demonstrates the advances made by universities across the globe in this pillar, where the sub-metrics are industry income and the number of patents from any source that cite research conducted by the University.
The Research Quality pillar underwent significant changes last year with three new metrics added which are derived from citations data (research strength, research excellence and research influence). It is positive to see a climb of two places for research quality this year both globally (now 294th) and in terms of UK ranking (now 40th in the UK) and fourth in Scotland. This may indicate that the University is starting to turn a corner on citations as a result of enhanced focus on this area in the past couple of years.
In terms of Research Environment, our UK rank has continued to improve, rising one place to 28th (and up from 33rd five years ago). By contrast our global ranking has gone down 10 places to 338th this year, due to a drop in research reputation derived from the survey outcomes, though our performance on the sub-metric for research income improved significantly. Again, this points to the declining competitiveness of UK universities globally not least due to the lower levels of investment in research in the UK compared with other countries.
Challenges
The University has fallen from 414th to 499th globally for the Teaching pillar this year. Our performance has tended to fluctuate between 400th and 500th over the last 7 years and this year’s fall can be attributed not only to a decline in our teaching reputation (which is more than 50% of this pillar) but also our doctorate to academic staff ratio. In UK terms, having risen from 37th to 27th in the UK last year we have also fallen four places to 31st in the UK this year. There are opportunities to grow our reputation for teaching given our strong performance in recent UK league tables which are predominantly derived from teaching metrics. Our plans to grow the number of PhD students will be a further important dimension of driving improvement in this our lowest performing pillar in terms of global ranking.
We have much to be proud of as a University in terms of our research successes and teaching excellence. However, this ranking, similar to the QS World University Rankings published in June, where we ranked 236th globally, shows that we must continue efforts to enhance the visibility of our successes to strengthen reputation if we are to reclaim our top 200 rank.
A full report on the results is available on the Directorate of Planning & Governance webpages.
The final league table results in the 2025 round will be the THE Subject Rankings, which are due to be released on 29 October.
Best wishes
Karl
Karl Leydecker
Senior Vice-Principal