Tel Aviv University Climbs in QS World Rankings, Leads Israeli Universities

Tel Aviv University rose to 208th place in the QS World University Rankings, overtaking the Hebrew University as Israel’s highest-ranked institution. The university had been 223rd last year. The Hebrew University also improved, moving from 240th to 218th, while the Technion advanced from 350th to 334th.

The new results show a broader improvement for Israeli universities compared with last year and, in Tel Aviv University’s case, also versus earlier QS editions. The article notes that Tel Aviv University had regularly appeared in the second hundred of the rankings, but in recent years slipped into the third hundred before regaining ground.

QS ranks 1,500 universities worldwide. Other Israeli universities in the list include Ben-Gurion University at 533rd, Bar-Ilan University in the 711 to 720 range, and the University of Haifa in the 801 to 850 range. All three fell significantly compared with last year. Reichman University, Ariel University, and Kiryat Shmona, described as relatively new, do not appear in the ranking. The Weizmann Institute and the Open University are also excluded because they do not function as classical universities.

The ranking is produced by Quacquarelli Symonds using quantitative measures and interviews. The company previously worked with Times Higher Education, but the two split in 2009 and now publish separate rankings alongside the Shanghai Ranking, which are considered the field’s leading lists. In the latest Shanghai Ranking, the Weizmann Institute was 71st, the Hebrew University 88th, and Tel Aviv University in the 200 to 300 band. In QS sub-indices, Tel Aviv University placed 29th for citations per faculty and 82nd for employment outcomes, while the Hebrew University stood out at 43rd for employment outcomes. Globally, the top 10 were led by MIT, followed by Imperial College London, Stanford, Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge, Caltech, ETH Zurich, UCL, and the National University of Singapore.