Manchester Uni soars into top 40 unis in the world

A well respected global league table has ranked Manchester as the 38^th best university in the world.

According to the Academic Ranking of World Universities 2014 – compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University – Manchester is also in the top 10 European and top five UK universities based on research expertise.

Prospects are high for the University of Manchester

The climb of three places, which has seen Manchester overtake the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Copenhagen, has been put down to improvements in highly-cited nature and science publications.

Professor Luke Georghiou, Vice President Research and Innovation, said: “It is the University’s goal to be a world-leading institution. While all ranking systems have their faults, it is nonetheless pleasing to see our progress marked by this increase. This is particularly the case because the ARWU rankings tend to be quite static.”

The professor also highlighted how Manchester Uni has had the largest increase of any university in the index over the last 10 years. So it looks like Manchester might just achieve its mission of becoming a global top 25 research university by 2020. He gave credit to his colleagues “whose excellent research underpins our position.”

Overall there are now 38 UK universities in the top 500, with Brunel joining most recently. Cambridge lies in 5^th place, followed by Oxford in 10^th.

But it isn’t good news for everyone, with Nottingham falling out of the top 100 this year.

American unis still hog the top three places, with Harvard sitting in 1^st place for the 12^th year in a row. Stanford and MIT follow in 2^nd and 3^rd .

Chinese universities are beginning to creep up the list with Peking, Tsinghua and Shianghai Jiao Tong itself rising into the top 100-150.

To see the full 2014 league table visit the ARWU website.