Energy News Monitoring

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings were established in 2004 and include the world's overall, subject, and reputation rankings, as well as three regional tables, including Asia, Latin America, and BRICS & Emerging Economies.
The rankings table for engineering and technology features the universities that are leading across subjects, such as general engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, and civil engineering. For the complete rankings, please visit the homepage of Times Higher Education.

The rankings use 13 performance indicators which are grouped into five areas: teaching, research, citations, international outlook, and industrial income. This year, due to a small adjustment in the eligibility criterion for academic staff in the subject tables, more universities were included in the rankings. The 2019 engineering and technology ranking has also increased to include 903 universities, up from 501 last year. Institutions provide their institutional data for use in the rankings. If, in the rare case a particular data point is not provided, a conservative estimate is made for that particular metric.

The University of Oxford currently leads the table for the first time. Oxford is a modern, research-driven university, which places particular emphasis on sciences. It is associated with 11 winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, five in Physics and 16 in Medicine. Notable Oxford thinkers and scientists include Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. Oxford overtook last year`s leader Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology, which is now in 4^th place. Harvard University joins the table in 3^rd place. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology meanwhile has dropped to 5^th place, although in the past few years the school has increased its focus on innovation, launching the MIT Innovation Initiative, which has led to 60 US patents licensed by multinational companies.

Peking University is still the highest-ranked Asian university, despite dropping seven places to 14^th position. Its faculty includes 53 members of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences and seven of the equivalent academy of engineering. Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, ranks 15^th, climbing one place from last year. Its NTU Smart Campus is a hotbed of various sustainable and energy-efficient technologies. It strives to demonstrate to other communities around the world how advanced tech-enabled solutions can improve everyday life in a sustainable manner. The university has also entered into a number of partnerships with companies such as BMW, Volvo Bus, Blue Solutions and SMRT to develop smart solutions for both electric and autonomous vehicles.

Meanwhile, Germany’s two leading technical universities, the Technical University of Munich and RWTH Aachen University, have both dropped several places to 26^th and 27^th position, respectively, possibly due to a slight decline in research activity.

Although it would appear that the top universities are almost entirely located in the United States and the United Kingdom, universities in Singapore, China and Switzerland have also performed exceptionally well and achieved high rankings in the 2019 list. China, which is behind Japan and the United States, is the third most-represented country in the rankings of the best universities for engineering, overtaking the UK, Germany, Australia and Canada.