TEHRAN - The 2023 ranking of the Times Higher Education has placed a number of Iranian universities on its top institutes in terms of education.

Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences comes first among the Iranian universities with a rank in the range of 351–400.

Islamic Azad University, Najafabad Branch, comes next with a rank in the range of 501–600.

Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University, Iran University of Medical Sciences, University of Kashan, University of Kurdistan, University of Mohaghegh Ardabili, University of Tabriz, and The University of Tehran are in the range of 601–800.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2023 include 1,799 universities across 104 countries and regions, making them the largest and most diverse university rankings to date.

The table is 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 analyzed over 121 million citations across more than 15.5 million research publications and included survey responses from 40,000 scholars globally. Overall, we collected over 680,000 data points from more than 2,500 institutions that submitted data.

The University of Oxford tops the ranking for the seventh consecutive year. Harvard University remains in second place, but the University of Cambridge jumps from joint fifth last year to joint third.

Overall ranking

There are 65 universities from Iran in the 2023 ranking of the Times Institute of Higher Education, which indicates a 10 percent increase compared to 58 universities ranked last year.

Being sixth among countries with more than 50 representatives is one of the important features of this ranking for Iran.

According to this report, "Golestan Medical Sciences", "Kurdistan Medical Sciences", and "Mazandaran Medical Sciences" universities are in first place nationally and 351-400 in the world.

The position of two Iranian universities is also defined as "reporter". Institutions whose world ranking is "reporter" are those that have provided their data to "Times Higher Education Institute", but did not meet the minimum required to obtain rank.

After Japan, China and India, Iran was the fourth Asian country having the highest number of universities included in the 2023 edition.

In total, 1799 institutions from 104 different countries of the world are listed. In the Middle East, Turkey and Iran have the largest share. Meanwhile, Asia has the most representatives in this ranking with 669 universities.

In last year's ranking, 58 institutions from Iran were among the top institutions in the world. Examining the annual trend of the presence of Iranian universities has shown a continuous increase from one university in the 2012 edition to 65 universities in the 2023 edition.

However, it should be noted that the number of "Times Institute of Higher Education" top institutions has also increased year by year. For example, in the 2022 edition, 1,662 universities from different countries were ranked.

Three Iranian universities are among a total of 550 institutes worldwide listed in the Graduate Employability Rankings 2022.

The QS World University Rankings portfolio, inaugurated in 2004, has grown to become the world’s most popular source of comparative data about university performance.

In 2022, the Sharif University of Technology and the University of Tehran, with a rank in the range of 301-500, were listed among the top 500 universities in the world for the first time in this field, and the Amirkabir University of Technology was also ranked in the +501 category.

International students

The number of foreign students will double in the Iranian universities in the next three years, Hashem Dadashpour, the Iranian deputy science minister has said.

Universities should increase their interactions and scientific exchanges in order to attract international students and accelerate internationalization in the region and the world, he highlighted.

Iranian universities achieved good ranks at the global level and based on the evaluations of the world’s most prestigious institutions so that there is the capacity to attract international students, he said.

He mentioned holding the cultural and sports Olympiad for international students as a way to make them more aware of Iran’s capabilities, ISNA reported.

By the next three years, the number of foreign students from 120 countries will increase by two times in the universities of the country, he predicted.

Some 108,000 students from 117 countries have enrolled in Iranian universities for the current academic year (started September 23), Mohammad Mohammadi Masoudi, an official with the Ministry of Science, has said.

MG