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The University of Birmingham has been ranked in the top 100 universities worldwide for Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy, Life and Agriculture Sciences, and Physics. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), also known as the Shanghai Ranking, has placed Birmingham overall within the top 150 universities globally.

More than 1,200 universities are ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 universities are published. ARWU adopts six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of Highly Cited Researchers and the number of articles published in journals such as Nature and Science.

Commenting on the results, University of Birmingham Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir David Eastwood said: ‘Our impressive position in the Shanghai Ranking for 2014 comes at the end of a remarkable year for the University, in which we were named University of the Year by The Times and The Sunday Times.

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‘Although league tables cannot capture fully the full breadth of what makes the University of Birmingham world class, they do provide a useful tool for us to benchmark against. Our performance clearly reflects the quality of our academic staff; with our continuing investment in staff and facilities and innovative initiatives such as the Birmingham Fellows scheme for outstanding early career researchers, I am confident that we will continue on our upward trajectory in future league tables, such as the Shanghai Ranking.’

These latest rankings build on the University’s impressive performance across all higher education league tables. Indeed, when it comes to “graduate prospects” – the number of graduates who enter professional employment or graduate-level further study within six months of graduating – the University of Birmingham is ahead of institutions such as Oxford, and was recently ranked eighth overall in the UK by The Guardian University Guide 2015.

Furthermore, the National Student Survey (NSS) – the most comprehensive measure of student satisfaction within UK higher education – has awarded the University of Birmingham an overall satisfaction mark of 89 per cent in 2014, up from 88 per cent for the past two years and a rise of five places among Russell Group institutions.

ENDS

Since 2003, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has been presenting the world Top 500 universities annually based on a set of objective indicators and third-party data. The complete lists and detailed methodologies can be found at www.shanghairanking.com.

For interview requests or for more information, please contact Ben Goodwin, International Media Relations Manager, University of Birmingham on +44 (0) 121 414 8254. For out of hours media enquiries, please call: +44 (0) 7789 921 165

  • The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world’s top 100 institutions (62 in the QS World University Rankings 2013/14), its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers and teachers and more than 4,000 international students from nearly 150 countries.