“Not Delft, but Utrecht is the best university in the Netherlands.”

You may not have known it, but Delft is home to the best university in our country. This has been calculated by influential rating makers Times Higher Education. It’s the 2024 rankings, but it seems like it was already known three months ago that Delft will be better than the rest next year.

In recent years, the academic landscape has looked very different: at that time, Delft had to tolerate alternating Amsterdam, Wageningen, Leiden, Groningen and Utrecht.

If you have an academic question in the field of medicine, law, social sciences or classical languages ​​and go to Delft with high hopes based on this thesis, you are out of luck. You will not find these departments at the Technical University.

The university registered 76.3 points; The number after the decimal point indicates that the university’s quality score can be calculated very accurately. However, electrical engineering research cannot be compared to oncology research, nor can mechanical engineering research be compared to Korean studies. Not only in terms of content, but also in terms of method: in astronomy, it is not unusual to have more than a hundred co-authors on an article, while in the humanities articles with one or two authors are still common. Obviously it’s easier to get many posts if there are hundreds of you working together. The correction mechanisms built into taxonomy for such scale differences only partially work.

In addition, this rating contains many criteria on which the university itself does not have much influence. The university gets extra points if there are not too many students per teacher. Tuition fees in the Netherlands are regulated by law, and currently amount to 2,314 euros per year. At “major foreign universities” the figure is often at least ten times that. Naturally, you will receive more individual attention from the teacher. But the fact that Dutch education is not only for the rich seems to me something that should give me a higher grade.

Other criteria influenced by the university are not counted in the rankings. A colleague from Delft recently resigned because… Institutional sexism But something like this doesn’t result in any penalty points.

These classifications have been criticized for years. They measure quality according to a very one-sided definition. Recent Nobel laureate Katalin Carrico barely scores in this ranking, yet her work is the basis of the coronavirus vaccine that has saved millions of lives.

This is just part of the criticism. Rankings also provide an incentive to deliver a lot of work rather than good work. University administrators Cash share But at the same time they go through all kinds of questionable turns to score as high as possible.

That has finally changed. Utrecht University He no longer participates He refused times To provide the required information. In Utrecht, the perverse incentives resulting from the world rankings ended. Since Utrecht is the only university this year that deals with the rankings in proportion to a scientific institution, it is easy to answer the question “what is the best university in the country” this year.