European Universities in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2013

Guest post: Martin Ince. 

Europe’s standing as a coherent political and economic unit has been put under immense stress by the global economic crisis. But the 2013 QS World University Rankings by Subject reinforce the point that Europe has also failed to become united in scholarly and educational terms.

While individual European nations guard their own school-level education systems jealously, universities are an area in which there has long been pressure for standards to be set at a continental level. This is seen most clearly in the Bologna process and in the foundation of the European Research Council, intended respectively to harmonize teaching and to make top researchers compete for money on a European stage.

This year’s QS World University Rankings by Subject suggest that Europe’s ambitions have some way to go. A single US institution, Harvard, is first in ten of the 30 subjects ranked, with other US universities topping a further dozen. The other eight subject rankings are all led by UK universities: four by Oxford, three by Cambridge and one by Imperial College London. Cambridge is Europe’s highest ranked institution for 12 out of the 30 subjects.

View the QS World University Rankings by Subject in full >

Universities in Europe retain influential position

The obvious conclusion is that the big US universities have pulled ahead of the continental European higher education system, taking with them the well-resourced UK institutions which attract most British research funding.

But a closer look suggests that continental Europe has strengths that it would be foolish to ignore.

A look at the top 20 universities in each subject shows that in one ranking, communications, Europe has only two entrants, while in geography it has ten, mainly because the subject is not widely recognized in US education. Across the full range, there is an average of 5.4 European universities in the top 20. About a quarter tend to be from continental Europe.

This may sound like a modest achievement for an affluent region with comparative political stability and deep cultural roots. But look at it another way. With a population of about 400 million, Europe has less than 6% of the world’s people, but still manages to have perhaps a fifth of its influential universities.

In addition, it is wrong to suppose that all good European universities are in the UK. For example, Wageningen University in the Netherlands is second only to the University of California at Davis in the agriculture ranking. This is the highest placing by any continental university in any of the 30 subjects.

Agriculture is now a broad subject of world importance due to issues like climate change, population growth and rising food prices, and Wageningen is growing in importance as a result. The ranking for agriculture, published this year for the first time, is also unusual for showing the UK’s Reading University in 11th place, while Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial are absent.

European leadership in sciences

These tables also show that the Swiss system, the subject of heavy investment both national and local, may well have produced continental Europe’s top science universities. Appropriately for the home nation of CERN, Switzerland has two top-20 institutions in physics, perhaps the most prestigious of the sciences.

ETH Zurich, consistently the top Swiss institution in the QS World University Rankings, is also the highest-placed European university for the environmental sciences ranking, and comes tenth in the related area of Earth sciences. In addition, it is 14th in agriculture, giving it a leadership position in all subjects relating to the natural world.

Moving from science to the closely related area of biomedicine, this analysis shows that two things make a great medical school – money and patients. The rich medical schools of the US dominate the top spots along with the big university/hospital systems of the UK, especially in London.

The latter have the advantage of London’s massive and diverse population as a base for new knowledge. Their researchers can find patients with any known disease without leaving town. The UK’s position in medicine is doubtless also buoyed by the presence of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s biggest charities, most of whose spending occurs in the UK. Meanwhile the top continental institution is Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, a high-prestige medical university and home to the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine.

Importance of industry connections

However, it is notable that no fewer than nine European universities make it into the top 20 for the other medical area we rank, pharmacy & pharmacology. These universities are in the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands, and are joined by others in Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy and Spain in the top 50. There may be a link between this success and the strength of the European pharmaceutical industry, which pushes constantly for new basic science as well as for usable drugs.

The benefits of strong links to industry are visible too in the rankings for technology subjects, including computer science and materials science as well as civil, chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering. The top tiers of these rankings look very similar to those for the sciences, with which they are connected more and more closely.

For example, the UK’s University of Manchester is 36th for physics and 21st for materials science. These twin strengths make sense in light of the work of the university’s Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010, and whose research concerns the development of a new material, graphene, a form of carbon with exotic and promising properties.

In our engineering rankings, UK universities such as Cambridge and Imperial, with strong links to big companies, are inevitably prominent. One continental institution which performs strongly is Delft University of Technology. It is fourth for civil engineering, where Imperial College London comes top.

Mixed picture for humanities and social sciences

The arts, humanities and social sciences carry mixed fortunes for European universities. It is no surprise that the US and the UK dominate research and teaching on the English language and its literature.

It is perhaps less intuitive that the top continental university for philosophy, the canonical humanities subject, does not appear until 24th place – even though this institution, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, is followed immediately by four more from Germany, France and Belgium.

We find a similar pattern for the key subject within the social sciences, sociology itself. Only a small number of continental institutions are well-placed here, including two from the Netherlands: the University of Amsterdam in 16th place and Utrecht University at 23.

The University of Amsterdam also appears in seventh place in our ranking of universities for communications and media studies, one of the highest positions here for any continental university. Even more interesting is the position of the University of Westminster in the communications ranking. Westminster is in 19th place, ahead of LSE at 24.

This is big news for a university that has only existed since 1992 and which is as yet absent from the overall QS World University Rankings. It is also surprising that UK universities show so poorly in the ranking for communications. After all, the English language dominates global dialogue, while the UK itself is home base for prestigious world media such as the BBC.

European universities ‘solid’ rather than ‘world-beating’

The subject rankings methodology is designed to highlight successes in subjects such as these, which may not generate large volumes of publications and citations. It shows that the London School of Economics is the top European institution for accountancy, politics, economics and sociology.

LSE is in second place globally for the first two of these, and third and fourth for economics and sociology respectively. In all of these areas it is beaten only by household-name US competitors.

These results suggest that continental European universities are solid rather than world-beating in their overall achievement. It remains to be seen how they will weather Europe’s current financial traumas, given that most of them are highly dependent on state spending. In the longer term, it will also be interesting to see how their status holds up against the growing ambition of Asian institutions, and indeed whether they might displace troubled US universities from the higher positions in coming years.

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