The Times Higher Education 100 Under 50
The University of York has been ranked eighth in the world and number one in the UK in new Times Higher Education world rankings of universities less than 50 years old.
In just 49 years, York has managed to forge a powerful global reputation as a strong research-led university, and it performs very well against the world’s elite heritage institutions across Times Higher Education’s 13 separate ranking indicators
Phil Baty, Editor of the Times Higher Education Rankings
The University is among institutions from six nations that feature in the world’s top 10 reaffirming York’s international reputation for excellence in research, teaching, knowledge transfer and global outlook. This latest accolade, coinciding with the University’s recent invitation to join the Russell Group, confirms the University’s enormous impact in teaching, research and engagement in less than 50 years.
Since its inception in 1963, the University has achieved a consistent top ranking in the UK and is one of just a few post-war universities to make the World Top 100.
The new rankings relied on the world’s largest academic reputation survey – involving 17,500 academics – and an analysis of 50 million citations. According to the Times Higher Education the ranking “employed the same sophisticated range of indicators as the prestigious Times Higher Education World University Rankings, with weightings carefully recalibrated to suit the profile of younger universities”.
The rankings used 13 separate performance indicators, covering all core missions of a modern global university – research, teaching, knowledge transfer and international outlook.
Research
Our research focuses increasingly on the challenges of the modern world and on a commitment to benefit society. The lives of many thousands of people are improved as a result of work done at York.
Recent highlights include:
- An important advance in understanding how the cholera bacterium survives in our body
- The Department of Archaeology's Queen's Anniversary Prize in 2011, recognising its influential role in broadening the scope of the subject
- A blueprint for the long-term sustainability of tuna caught using the pole-and-line method
Find out more on our research pages.
Teaching
We are proud of our role in educating students, transforming their lives and inspiring them to make a difference in the world. From the University’s inception, teaching has been seen as equally important as research, and many of our world‑class research staff are involved in our degree programmes.
Our 30 academic departments and centres are spread evenly between the arts, social sciences, and science and technology, and score highly in surveys measuring student satisfaction.
Networking events, internships, volunteering and transferable skills programmes help our students to stand out from the crowd in today’s competitive job market.
The University is committed to investing in teaching and learning facilities such as the 3Sixty exhibition space, a unique environment in the Creative Technologies Centre to showcase innovative exhibitions and technology.
Find out more about undergraduate study and postgraduate study opportunities at York.
International outlook
Staff and students of the highest calibre come to York from all corners of the world, building a global community on campus. York’s academic faculty is 40 per cent international, and 25 per cent of our student body comes from outside the UK.
- York is a member of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) and of the Santander Universities Network.
- Global partners include IBM, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, and world-leading researchers from universities such as Peking, Cornell, São Paulo, Sydney and Hong Kong.
- Every student has opportunities to study, work or volunteer abroad through our Global York programme.
- All first-year students are entitled to take a foreign language course free of charge.
Find out more on our International Relations pages.
Knowledge transfer
Working with leading aerospace companies including Rolls-Royce, researchers in Computer Science have developed Signal Data Explorer, a 'search engine for signals', that enables data to be translated into useful intelligence. "In an aircraft engine, a signal you're interested in might be a bird strike or just a squeaky bearing," explains Professor Jim Austin. "You can search a database to find a similar event and see how someone else has fixed it."
Other major collaborators include Al Jazeera, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM, Microsoft, Nestlé, Unilever and the United Nations. Our specialist Research and Enterprise Office helps to find new opportunities for partnerships, encouraging close collaborations with commerce and industry regionally, nationally and around the world.
Find out more about working with the University.
Further information
For more on the Times Higher Education 100 Under 50 rankings and the performance indicators used, see the Times Higher Education website and the University of York press release.