Poland slides in new international ranking with seven universities among top 1,000

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Seven Polish universities have been rated as among the best 1,000 in the world in the latest edition of the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). That is one fewer than last year and two fewer than in 2023.

However, only the University of Warsaw was ranked in the top 500, in the 401-500 band (for universities below the top 100, exact positions are not given). Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, previously in the same category, has now dropped into the 501-600 band.

ARWU, commonly referred to as the Shanghai Ranking, is one of the three major international university rankings, alongside the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the QS World University Ranking.

The seven Polish universities that made the top 1,000 were ranked as follows:

1. University of Warsaw (401-500)
2. Jagiellonian University (501-600)
3. AGH University of Science and Technology (801-900)
4. Adam Mickiewicz University (901-1000)
5. Nicolaus Copernicus University (901-1000)
6. Warsaw University of Technology (901-1000)
7. Wrocław University of Science and Technology (901-1000)

This year, Harvard University topped the ARWU, as it has every year since the ranking began in 2003. It was followed by Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

British and American universities dominate the table, taking all but one of the top 20 spots, with Paris-Saclay University in 13th place. Meanwhile, very few universities from central and eastern Europe find themselves in the upper reaches of the list, with Moscow State University in 97th, Prague’s Charles University in 301-400, and Saint Petersburg State University in 301-400.

In the latest Times Higher Education World University Rankings, published last October, Poland’s top universities performed slightly worse than in the ARWU, with Wrocław Medical University ranked in the 501-600 bracket and both the University of Warsaw and the Jagiellonian in 601-800.

The QS World University Ranking’s methodology has historically been most positive about Polish institutions. The University of Warsaw (271st) and the Jagiellonian (joint 303rd) both find themselves in QS’s current top 350. A total of ten Polish colleges – down from 12 last year – are in the top 1,000.

The University of Warsaw was founded in 1816 as a response to the partitioning of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria, which prevented Warsaw’s academic youth from studying in Kraków.

Today, it is Poland’s biggest university, with around 50,000 students in more than 100 programmes. Its alumni include Nobel literature laureates Czesław Miłosz and Olga Tokarczuk, as well as two prime ministers of Israel, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.

Despite their illustrious pasts, Poland’s top universities today struggle to compete in international rankings, as do others across the central and eastern European region.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Adrian Grycuk/Wikipedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0 PL)

Agnieszka Wądołowska

Agnieszka Wądołowska is deputy editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. She is a member of the European Press Prize’s preparatory committee. She was 2022 Fellow at the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at City University of New York. In 2024, she graduated from the Advanced Leadership Programme for Top Talents at the Center for Leadership. She has previously contributed to Gazeta Wyborcza, Wysokie Obcasy and Duży Format.