NUS, NTU rise in World University Rankings 2023; both among top 50 in the world

The National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) improved their standings in the latest Times Higher Education World University Rankings released on Wednesday (Oct 12). 

The NUS rose to 19th, up two spots from 21st in the 2022 rankings, and it is the first time the university has moved into the top 20.

The NTU improved its rankings by 10 spots, moving to 46 last year to 36 this year.  

Among universities in Asia, NUS ranks third. China’s Tsinghua University and Peking University, ranked 16th and 17th, are the top universities in the continent. 

The other four local universities in Singapore – Singapore Management University, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore Institute of Technology and Singapore University of Technology and Design – are not ranked. 

The 2023 World University Rankings included a record 1,799 universities across 104 countries and regions, making this year the most diverse university rankings in its 19-year history. 

The rankings are based on 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators that measure an institution’s performance across four areas: Teaching, Research, Knowledge Transfer and International Outlook.

This year’s ranking analysed over 121 million citations across more than 15.5 million research publications and included survey responses from 40,000 scholars globally. 

Overall, over 680,000 data points were collected from more than 2,500 institutions that submitted data.

The University of Oxford topped the 2023 rankings for the seventh time in a row. Harvard University from the United States came in second, while the University of Cambridge in England and Stamford University in the United States are tied in third. 

The United States’ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (fifth), California Institute of Technology (sixth), Princeton University (seventh), University of California, Berkeley (eighth), Yale University (ninth) and United Kingdom’s Imperial College London (10th) round up the top 10.