Polish universities climb to highest ever position in world ranking

Poland’s top two universities have risen to their highest ever positions in the prestigious QS World University Ranking, and are now rated as among the 300 best universities in the world for the first time.

According to the newly released index, the best Polish institution is the University of Warsaw, which took 284th place, up from 308th last year. The Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland’s oldest institute of higher education, was close behind in 293rd, up from 309th.

Thirteen more Polish institutions, the same number as last year, also rated among the world’s 1000 best, with their rankings as follows (for universities below the top 500, exact positions are not given):

1. University of Warsaw (284th)
2. Jagiellonian University (293rd)
3. Life Sciences in Poznań (521-530)
4. Warsaw University of Technology (521-530)
5. AGH University of Science and Technology (801-1000)
6. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań (801-1000)
7. Cracow University of Technology (801-1000)
8. Gdańsk University of Technology (801-1000)
9. Łódź University of Technology (801-1000)
10. Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (801-1000)
11. Poznań University of Technology (801-1000)
12. University of Gdańsk (801-1000)
13. University of Łódź (801-1000)
14. University of Wrocław (801-1000)
15. Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (801-1000)

The QS ranking differs from the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) – widely referred to as the Shanghai Ranking – which last year found only ten Polish universities in the top 1,000 and placed both the Jagiellonian and University of Warsaw in the 401-500 bracket.

The third of the main three such rankings, compiled by the Times Higher Education, by contrast includes only two Polish universities in the top 1,000: the Jagiellonian (in the 501-600 bracket) and the University of Warsaw (601-800 bracket)

Main image credit: Kenneth Lee/Flickr (under CC BY-NC 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is deputy editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She has written for Clean Energy Wire and The Times, and she hosts her own podcast, The Warsaw Wire, on Poland’s economy and energy sector. She previously worked for Reuters.