Weizmann Institute of Science. (photo credit: Courtesy)
The Center for World University Rankings, initiated in Saudi Arabia and headquartered in the United Arab Emirates, has ranked the Weizmann Institute of Science among the top 50 degree-granting institutions in the world.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University were also ranked in the top 100, placing at 61 and 85, respectively. The Technion-Israeli Institute of Technology ranked 147th, while Ben-Gurion University of the Negev ranked 394th. Bar-Ilan University and the University of Haifa rounded out the list of Israeli universities, ranking at 492 and 620, respectively.
Among the factors that contributed to the Weizmann Institute’s overall ranking were its “Quality of Education Rank” and “Quality of Faculty Rank.”
“A key factor in the rankings is research, and Israeli institutions will find it increasingly difficult to compete in the future with American and European research-intensive universities, if the government does not increase its spending on scientific research,” Dr. Nadim Mahassen, president of the Center for World University Rankings, said of the findings.
In 2018, the rankings featured universities in 61 countries – more than ever before – among the top 1,000 institutions.
The CWUR publishes the only global university ranking that measures the quality of education and training of students as well as the prestige of the faculty members and the quality of their research, without relying on surveys and university data submissions.
The rankings give different weights across eight objective and robust indicators to determine the world’s top 1,000 universities: quality of education, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have won major international awards, prizes and medals, relative to the university’s size [25%]; alumni employment, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have held CEO positions at the world’s top companies, relative to the university’s size [25%]; and quality of faculty, measured by the number of academics who have won major international awards, prizes and medals [25%].
In addition, the university’s publications, influence, citations, broad impact, and patents (each weighing 5% of the overall score) are all taken into consideration.
US and UK universities still ranked as the top universities in the world: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago filled the top 10 slots.