TUM only German university to make top 50 in QS ranking

Only one German university has made it into the top 50 institutions in the QS World University Rankings 2027. Three more German higher education institutions made it into the top 100. But how are the rankings compiled?

2027 QS World University Rankings

Every year, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a higher education analysis company, compiles a list of what it considers the best higher education institutions in the world for its World University Rankings. The 2027 edition includes 1.504 universities, with 98 new entrants, representing over 100 locations worldwide.

QS decides whether a university is “good” using 10 key metrics, each with its own weighting, to calculate an overall score out of 100. The metrics are: academic reputation; citations per faculty; employer reputation; employment outcomes; faculty-to-student ratio; international faculty ratio; international research network; international student diversity; international student ratio; and sustainability.

In the 2027 ranking, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was named the best university in the world for the 15th consecutive year, with a perfect score of 100. Imperial College London and Stanford University came in joint second place, the University of Oxford in fourth, while Harvard University rounded out the top five. 

ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the National University of Singapore were the only universities outside the US and the UK to make the top 10.

How does QS decide which universities are the best?

University rankings are a relatively new phenomenon. The first global rankings were published in 2003, and the first QS ranking was published in 2004.

Since then, prospective students have increasingly used rankings to inform their decision about where to study. Simultaneously, there has been increasing scepticism about the methodologies and techniques that university ranking companies use to determine which institutions are “the best”. 

For example, the QS ranking weighs each of its 10 metrics differently. Academic reputation has a 30 percent weighting, while faculty-to-student ratio has a 10 percent weighting and employment outcomes have a 5 percent weighting. 

According to the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research, it is not possible to assess the “multidimensional concept of university quality” based on such limited metrics, and rankings largely serve the businesses that publish them.

This is because a significant element of these ranking companies’ business models is to “collect vast amounts of data from universities and publicly accessible sources, which they then privatise in order to market them to universities, governments, and other interested parties in the form of performance analytics”,  according to the United Nations University (UNU).

The more universities included, the more ranking companies can “expand the market of prospective buyers of their data products, analytics, and consulting services”, says the UNU.

What’s more, if institutions criticise ranking companies for their limited assessments and profit-driven approach, and consequently decide to withhold data, they drop down in rankings or drop out entirely. 

For example, Utrecht University regularly ranked among the top 70 institutions in the Times Higher Education (THE) ranking. But in 2023, the Dutch university decided to withhold data, saying that the international rankings were “not compatible with the university's strategic plan and the concept of ‘Open Science’”. Since then, the university has no longer been included in the THE.

Speaking to IamExpat, Jelena Brankovic, a researcher at the University of Bielefeld whose expertise includes the university ranking industry, advised prospective students to “approach [rankings] with a healthy dose of scepticism”. 

“[Students] should never rely only on one source of information, such as a ranking, but should try to cast a wide net, compare information from various sources, discuss with peers and parents, and assess this against their own preferences,” Brankovic said.

Top 10 German universities in 2027

These are the 10 best universities in Germany in 2027, and how they ranked in the overall QS ranking:

• 25 TUM
• 61 LMU
• 86 University of Heidelberg
• 98 Free University of Berlin 
• 104 RWTH Aachen University
• 110 Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
• 140 Humboldt University of Berlin
• =158 Technical University of Berlin 
• =185 Technical University of Dresden
• =209 Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

For more information and to see the full ranking, visit the QS website.