The Center for World University Rankings has ranked The University of Texas at Austin No. 30 in its inaugural list of the world’s top 100 universities. The ranking combines seven factors educational quality, faculty quality, alumni employment, patents, publishing, faculty research citations, and influence.
The factor that most moved the university into the top ranks was quality of faculty, an index that denotes the weighted number of faculty members of an institution who have won prestigious honors such as the Nobel Prize, the Wolf Prize, the Turing Award, and the Schock Prize, all of which have been won by current faculty members physicist Steven Weinberg (Nobel Prize in Physics), chemist Allen Bard (Wolf Prize), computer scientist E. Allen Emerson (Turing Award), and mathematicians John Tate (Wolf Prize) and Luis Caffarelli (Wolf Prize, Schock Prize), among others.
According to the CWUR, the university is the 22nd best in the United States and the 8th best public university. Other Texas institutions that made the top 100 include UT Southwestern Medical Center (29), Rice University (57), Texas AandM (73), and UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (96).
“This ranking confirms what we’ve known for a long time that world-class universities are built by world-class faculty,” said President Bill Powers. “I’m gratified that excellence at UT Austin has been recognized by yet another organization with a multifaceted analysis of the world’s best academies. This is more good news for Texas alumni, whose diplomas increase in value the higher our rankings go.”
The Center for World University Rankings is based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A different system, the Academic Rankings of World Universities, created by a Shanghai-based think tank nine years ago, currently ranks UT Austin 38. Times Higher Education, the United Kingdom’s leading higher education publication, ranks UT Austin 29th in the world.
