University of Birmingham places in top 100 of global rankings

The University of Birmingham is among the world’s top 100 best performing universities for education and research – according to the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR).

Ranking 89th out of 20,966 universities according to the 2024 edition of CWUR’s Global 2000 rankings, which are published today (13 May), this places the University of Birmingham in the top 0.5% of universities.

CWUR also places the University in the top 30 for Europe (27th) and the UK’s top 10 (8th) in its annual rankings.

The rankings assess universities’ performance across four key pillars - education, employability, faculty, and research – with equal emphasis on student- and faculty-related indicators, after analysing 62 million outcome-based data points.

Professor Deborah Longworth, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education) said: “The CWUR rankings recognise the University of Birmingham as a global education and research destination for students and academics alike.

“Our students benefit from an outstanding research-intensive education that develops the knowledge, skills and attributes sought after by employers and delivers great career prospects for our graduates.

“Birmingham was recently revealed as the UK university most targeted by the country’s leading graduate employers, according to ‘The Graduate Market in 2024’. We are proud to be a destination of choice for those wishing to secure a top-flight career.”

CWUR uses seven outcome-based indicators grouped into four areas (education, employability, faculty, and research) to rank the world’s universities:

• Education: based on the academic success of a university’s alumni, measured relative to the university's size
• Employability: based on the professional success of a university’s alumni, measured relative to the university's size
• Faculty: the number of faculty members who have received top academic distinctions
• Research output: measured by the total number of research articles
• High-quality publications the number of research articles in top-tier journals
• Influence: measured by the number of research articles appearing in highly-influential journals
• Citations: measured by the number of highly-cited research articles

The University of Birmingham recently maintained its position amongst the best performing research-intensive universities in the world – with seven areas placing in the Top 50 of the latest QS World University Rankings by Subject.

Two of the University’s five faculty areas are in the top 100 of the prestigious global ranking – with Life Sciences & Medicine at 68 and Arts & Humanities placing at 64.

Sport, Dentistry, English, Theology, Anatomy & Physiology, Performing Arts, and Linguistics all place in the Top 50. Once again Sport is in the top 10 (6) with Linguistics rising 21 places to 28, Performing Arts up three places to 49 and English up one place to 26. There are 27 subject areas in the top 100 – an increase of five on last year.