Charles and Masaryk universities in Czechia ranked among world's best

According to a new annual ranking by British consulting firm Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), three Czech universities have made it into the world’s top 500 higher-educational institutions, with Charles University ranked highest, at 248th.

The ranking is based on nine criteria: reputation among representatives of other universities; reputation among employers; amount of cited authors; internationalization of the academic community; numbers of foreign students; the average number of students per teacher; sustainability, employer outcomes; and the level of universities' international research network. The latter three variables are new additions, which has to some extent shaken up the world rankings.

Charles University improved this year by 40 places and made the world’s top 250 universities for the first time since 2015. "I am pleased that the reputation of our university is growing on a global scale, not only among students and academics, but also in relation to the business sphere," said university rector Milena Králíčková.

The biggest jump in rankings was made by Masaryk University, which this year was ranked 400th – it was ranked outside the world’s top 500 in QS's previous edition.

The Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT) is the third university to feature in the rankings, although its ranking dropped substantially – from 378th last year to 454th now. The school attributes the decline to a change in QS’s methodology, which now includes some new criteria (such as employer outcomes). "Unfortunately, these new indicators – as well as the change in the weighting of the existing ones – meant that we had a bad performance for the first time since 2019," said the university in a press release.

Compared to last year’s ranking, the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague (VŠCHT) dropped out of the top 500.

Other Czech universities that were ranked between 500th and 1,000th are the Technical University in Brno, Palacky University in Olomouc, the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, and Mendel University in Brno.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology took first place in the whole ranking, with the University of Cambridge in second (and its rival, Oxford, in third).

A different, and also popular, global university ranking by British firm Times Higher Education (THE) puts Charles University between 501st and 600th. Masaryk University is far lower down the list, at between 801st and 1,000th. ČVUT, according to THE's classification, is ranked between 1,200th and 1,500th.