University of Manchester: Manchester among top international universities in new academic rankings

The University of Manchester has been ranked at number 38 in the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) which ranks the world’s leading higher education institutions.

The annual rankings see Manchester retain its top ten status as the 6th best institution in the UK and 8th in Europe, according to the ARWU.

This year, more than 2500 institutions were scrutinized, and the best 1000 universities in the world are published. Overall, The United Kingdom has 63 Top 1000 universities, and 38 of them are listed in the Top 500, 8 are listed in the Top 100.

Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor Luke Georgiou, said: “The ranking tables, despite their limitations, give a consistent picture of The University of Manchester’s excellence in national and global terms.”


The ranking tables, despite their limitations, give a consistent picture of The University of Manchester’s excellence in national and global terms.

Professor Luke Georghiou, Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of The University of Manchester

Starting from 2003, ARWU has been presenting the world’s top universities annually based on a set of objective indicators and third-party data. ARWU adopts six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, the number of Highly Cited Researchers and articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index based on data in the Web of Science, and per capita performance.

This latest ARWU ranking success follows on from Manchester named the world’s 28th best University according to the newest QS World University Rankings, published in June this year.

Earlier this year, Manchester was also named 5th place for research power – the quality and scale of research and impact – in the UK government’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, the major national exercise to evaluate research activity, which was last held in 2014.