It’s a custom tradition for Texas universities to playfully sling the mud and brag about who has the best football team, the highest out-of-college job placements, and the most diverse student population. Sure, it’s all lighthearted fun on the surface, but at the end of the day, alumni, students, and university officials really do care a great deal about where their university stands when it comes to rankings. Well, the University of Texas at Austin can pat itself on the back: it was recently ranked the 30th best university in the world.
“This ranking confirms what we’ve known for a long time — that world-class universities are built by world-class faculty,” UT Austin President Bill Powers said in a press release. “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 (CWUR) released its official rankings in early July, and to the astonishment of many, UT Austin was up much higher than years prior on the global list. To further explain the way in which the center determines its prestigious list, rankings are based on seven key factors: alumni employment, patents, faculty research citations, educational quality, faculty quality, publishing, and influence. According to the CWUR, UT Austin is also the 22nd best university in the U.S. as well as the eighth best public university. Two other well-known global-ranking lists, the Times Higher Education and the Academic Rankings of World Universities, rank UT Austin as the 29th and 38th best in the world.
According to a press release from UT Austin, “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.” Those specific faculty members include chemist Allen Bar (Wolf Prize winner), physicist Steven Weinberg (Nobel Prize winner), mathematician John Tate (Wolf Prize winner), mathematician Luis Caffarelli (Wolf Prize and Schock Prize winner), computer scientist E. Allen Emerson (Turing Award winner), and numerous others. To see the full list of award-winning professors, see this link.
For all you Texans who aren’t the biggest UT Austin fans, do not despair. Not all the love went to the Longhorns. Other Texas institutions that made it into the top 100 include UT Southwestern Medical Center at 29th, Rice University at 57th, Texas A&M at 73rd, and UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at 96th. To see the full list of rankings, click here. In the meantime, congratulations on such a prestigious honor to the University of Texas at Austin.
Pepper Givens is a freelance writer whose foremost passion is writing for her blog about education.While her primary writing focus is trends in higher ed, Pepper also enjoyswriting about personal finance, parenting, sustainable living, small business strategies and more. She can be reached for questions or comments at pepper.givens@gmail.com.
