TU Delft claims 16th place in THE Engineering & Technology rankings

TU Delft has risen to the 16th place in the worldwide Engineering & Technology ranking of the Times Higher Education Subject Rankings 2024 published on October 26. Engineering & Technology is the most relevant category for universities of technology such as TU Delft. For the past four years, the university has been placed 21st in this category, and this year’s ranking marks TU Delft’s best Engineering & Technology performance to date. In Europe, TU Delft came in 5h.

Overall, TU Delft’s achievements have topped those of last year, managing to retain or improve its position in all rankings, aside from a 3-place drop to 22nd in Arts & Humanities. The university’s rapid rise is most likely due to the updated methodology, which works to TU Delft’s advantage.

Perhaps the most striking result was TU Delft’s performance in Arts & Humanities. THE uses Arts & Humanities as a container term for the following subject areas: art, performing arts, design, languages, literature, linguistics, history, philosophy, theology, architecture and archaeology. The main disciplines for TU Delft are probably architecture, design and philosophy. While attaining such a high rank is remarkable for a technical university, it should be noted that TU Delft also obtain high scores for architecture (3) and arts & design (13) in the QS subject rankings.

THE Subject Rankings

The THE rankings are one of the leading university rankings in the world. Each ranking looks at different properties and uses a slightly different set of indicators. Every year, THE releases separate Subject Rankings in addition to the World University Rankings. The rankings are especially important for universities, as they are widely used by international students and scholars and help attract international talent.

New methodology

The subject rankings are made up of the same 13 indicators as the THE World University ranking, grouped into the main categories of Teaching, Research Environment, Research Quality, International Outlook and Industry. Times Higher Education has updated its methodology for the World University Rankings, making the same changes in its subject rankings. Citation indicators underwent the biggest changes, with the old citation impact indicator now being assigned an 15% weighting down from 30%. To fill this gap, three new citation-related indicators were created, along with a Patent indicator and the International Co-authorship indicator, all of which had a positive impact on TU Delft’s score.