The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) can now boast a Nobel Prize in Medicine, but that didn’t keep it from tumbling in the Times Higher Education rankings of universities around the world.
The universities are placed according to how they score on 13 indicators, for example how much of their research is cited, a survey regarding reputation, how many international students they attract and the credentials of faculty.
Fully 800 schools were evaluated this year and NTNU fell from being in the division 276 to 300 to 351-400. The loss of around 100 places came even though NTNU researchers May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser won the Nobel Prize in Medicine last year.
“We were suprised, this is quite a dump,” NTNU rector Gunnar Bovim told newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (DN). “We’re especially amazed because two of our researchers won a Nobel Prize. We don’t understand why. This ranking is often quite complicated, and going into all the details demands some time.”
The University of Oslo, on the other hand, rose in the rankings, from 186 to 135, as did the University of Bergen, rising from 201 to 182. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena topped the Times rankings, followed by the University of Oxford, Stanford University in California, the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
newsinenglish.no staff
