Which universities are top for 2022? Spain and the 'Shanghai ranking'

FOR a whole year-group of young adults, these few weeks are a terrifying, but exciting, time: It's that turning point when they decide which university they will spend the next years of their life at and which, far from just impacting on anything from one to six years of their immediate future, are likely to end up defining their entire career for them between now and retirement.

A huge responsibility to bear at a tender age, meaning those turning 18 in 2022 are not going to be the only ones facing it. Some may have opted to defer their choice by another year, to ensure they get it right, to improve on their grades and widen their options, or to gain valuable work, travel, volunteering or language-learning experience first.

Others, who may not have had this choice at 18, who made what they consider the wrong one or, maybe, the right one for that phase of their lives but whose criteria has changed, might be looking at university study as an older adult, in their 20s or even decades later; this is perfectly possibly nowadays through the endless distance-learning options out there, such as Spain's 'open university', the UNED.

Many more will be weighing up the best establishment to further their existing qualifications through a master's or doctorate.

Student behaviour: Flying the nest vs close to home

In Spain, it is traditional to simply apply to your nearest university, typically in your closest provincial capital city or the one in the biggest city in your region – unlike in, for example, Anglo-Saxon nations where college is seen as an opportunity to 'get away' and 'experience the big wide world', often with the aim of heading for the institution as far from home as possible, Spanish students tend to stick close to the nest and return to the family residence at weekends, only living away from Monday to Friday.

In fact, commuter trains and bus routes outside of the summer months are usually busiest on Friday nights and Sunday nights, with young adults heading home for the weekend and then setting off again at the start of the next college week.

Compare this with, say, the UK, where a student living on the south coast might head for the north of England or Scotland and then work or travel all summer, barely touching base with their parents in three or four years; or with Malta, an island nation so small that the university is within a comfortable morning bus ride of anywhere, meaning student accommodation does not exist – kids from everywhere in the country just commute, and are back in the family home every evening.

There are, of course, exceptions. Some Spanish students have a very specific career in mind that their nearest universities may not provide for, or a course at a college hundreds of kilometres from home may be so good that they are determined to get onto it, even if it means being away from the family.

Or, as European Union citizens, they have the option to study abroad, in any country in the EU-27, as long as they are sufficiently competent in the language.

Many Spanish students will also apply for an Erasmus scholarship, allowing them to spend a year in another university in Europe and count their credits towards their degree. These are taught in English, so they will need to have a grasp of the language of around B1 level – about A-level standard or just below.

If you, or your children or grandchildren, are still mulling it over, though, it might help to know which universities in Spain are considered the highest-quality on the planet – especially if you want to give yourself the option of working somewhere else in the world at a later date.

'ARWU-listed' universities

Five Spanish universities have made it into the prestigious 'Shanghai Ranking' of the best 300 on earth, a list topped by the USA's Harvard, Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has moved up to third place this year.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has been compiled annually since 2003 by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China, and is widely considered to be the last word on education excellence.

Initially, these establishments are listed from one to 100, then in blocks – from 101-150, from 151-200, and from 201-300.

Harvard is the only institution that scores 100%, the second-placed Stanford earns 76.8% and the MIT, 70.1%.

All others score under 70%, starting with the UK's Cambridge University in fourth place at 69.6%.

How does Spain fare?

Barcelona University (Universidad de Barcelona, or UB) is the only Spanish institution to make it into the 151-200 slot, making it the highest-ranked in the country.

In fact, Spain's second-largest city is home to two of the ARWU-listed establishments for 2022 – Barcelona Autonomous University (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, or UAB) earns a place in the 201-300 section.

UAB is joined here by Madrid Complutense University, Granada University and Valencia University (Universitat de València, or UV).

Last year, Spain had four in the top 300 on earth, but Valencia's leap from the 301-400 slot to the 201-300 has increased the number of ARWU-listed institutions by 25% for 2022.

Outside the top 300, but still prestigious when considering how many tens of thousands exist on earth and how the Jiao Tong ranking analyses the performance of 2,000, Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University has made a giant leap, too, from the 401-500 to the 301-400 slot.

Pablo de Olavide University in Sevilla has also soared, but its rise has been even more meteoric: From the 801-900 in 2021, it now sits in the 601-700 section for 2022, meaning it has jumped anything from 101 to 299 rungs on the world higher education ladder.

For the first time, the Cádiz Campus in southern Spain and Elche's Miguel Hernández University in the south of Alicante province enter the top 1,000 – the former in the 901-1000 and the latter in the 801-900 blocks.

A handful have fallen in the standings in the past year – Valencia Polytechnic (UPV), Madrid Polytechnic (UPM), University of Salamanca (curiously, the oldest in the country and often considered the 'Oxford of Spain'), Rovira i Virgili in Catalunya, the University of the Balearic Islands, and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University in the Canary Islands.

How universities are ranked

Classification takes into account the number of articles an institution has published in scientific journals, particularly in the prestigious magazines Nature and Science, performance per head in terms of the size of the establishment, and the number of Nobel Prize winners who have studied there or who give lectures there, among other factors.

The full top 100, and European universities in the top 150

Cambridge University is followed, in order, by the University of California and Princeton University (USA), Oxford University (UK), Columbia University, California Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, Yale, Cornell, University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), John Hopkins, and Pennsylvania (all USA), completing the top 15.

L'Université de Paris-Saclay, in the French capital, is the highest-ranked in the European Union at 16, with 47%, above Washington University (USA), University College London (UK), University of California-San Francisco, and ETH-Zürich (Switzerland), completing the top 20.

University of California-San Diego, the University of Toronto (Canada), Imperial College London (UK), the University of Tokyo (Japan), and New York University round off the first 25.

Given the size of the country and its huge number of higher education institutions, US universities figure most prominently in the list – after Tsinghua in China at 26, the next five are in the United States: Washington-St Louis, Michigan-Ann Arbor, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Northwestern, and Duke – with Melbourne, Australia at 32 and Peking, China at 34, sandwiching Wisconsin-Madison at 33.

More national diversity is seen in the rest of the top 50: Edinburgh, UK at 35; Zhejiang, China (36); Texas-Austin (USA) at 37; Manchester, UK (38); Copenhagen, Denmark (39); Université PSL-Paris, France (40); Karolinska Institute, Sweden and Kyoto, Japan (joint 41st); Paris Sorbonne (43); Rockefeller (USA), British Columbia (Canada), Minnesota-Twin Cities (USA) in joint 44th; Queensland, Australia (47); King's College London, UK (48); Illinois-Urbana, USA (49), and Maryland, USA (50).

The compiling university, Jiao Tong in Shanghai, puts itself at joint 54th along with Utrecht, The Netherlands, after the three US universities of Colorado-Boulder, Texas-Southwest and Southern California.

Germany first enters the ranking at 56 (Technical University of Munich) and secondly at 58 (University of Munich), with California-Santa Bárbara (USA) at 57, then the University of Zürich (Switzerland) and Sydney University (Australia) complete the top 60.

After University of California-Irvine at 61, a greater national spread is seen in the rest of the top 70: Geneva, Switzerland and University of Science and Technology of China (joint 62nd); University of New South Wales, Australia and Vanderbilt University, USA (joint 64th); Groningen, The Netherlands (66); Fudan, China and Oslo, Norway (joint 67th); Aarhus, Denmark (69) and Heidelberg, Germany (70).

For the top 80, the National University of Singapore and the University of Texas-M. D. Anderson share 71st, followed by McGill (Canada) at 73 and Ghent, Belgium at 74; Monash, Australia at 75; Bonn, Germany at 76; The Hebrew University of Jerusalem at 77; Université Paris-Cité at 78 and, jointly at 79, Sun Yat-sen University in China and The Australian National University.

Bristol (UK), Pittsburgh (USA), then jointly at 83 - Purdue-West Lafayette (USA), Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Basel (Switzerland) and Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel) – Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands) at 87, Nanyang Technological University Singapore at 88, Uppsala (Sweden) at 89 and, jointly, McMaster (Canada) and Stockholm (Sweden), finish the top 90.

The final ones individually ranked before the numbers switch to blocks of 50 and then 100 are Alberta (Canada) and Helsinki (Finland) at joint 92nd; Florida (USA) at 94; KU Leuven (Belgium) at 95; Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China) and the University of Hong Kong (joint 96th); Seoul National University, South Korea (98); and Brown University (USA) and the University of Western Australia at joint 99th.

European universities between 101 and 150 are Aix-Marseille (France), Leiden (The Netherlands), London School of Economics, or LSE (UK), Moscow State University (Russia), Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands), Sapienza Università di Roma (Italy), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Switzerland), University of Glasgow (UK), University of Sheffield (UK), Université Grenoble-Alpes (France), Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), Amsterdam University (The Netherlands), University of Bern (Switzerland), Birmingham (UK), Exeter (UK), Freiburg (Germany), Gothenburg (Sweden), Lausanne (Switzerland), Liverpool (UK), Nottingham (UK), São Paulo (Brazil), Strasbourg (France), and Warwick (UK).