UOC only online university in Spain to appear in Times Higher Education ranking

Times Higher Education (THE), a British journal specializing in education, has just published its list of the world's best universities for 2021, in which the UOC appears for the third time. This year, just as it did in 2019, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya ranked in the 601-800 bracket, out of a total of 1,527 institutions. THE's World University Rankings is one of the most reputable, transparent higher education rankings out there, alongside the Shanghai University Ranking and the QS World University Rankings.

To gauge the universities' level of higher education excellence, the THE ranking looks at five areas, each one weighted as follows: teaching (30%), research (30%), citations (30%), international outlook (7.5%) and industry income (2.5%).

The UOC obtained the following results: 18.6 in teaching, 16.0 in research, 70.9 in citations, 34.7 in international outlook and 46.3 in industry income.

Spain's top three performers were Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), ranked 152nd; the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), 182nd; and the University of Barcelona (UB), 198th. The UOC ranked closely with other Catalan universities: the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), the University of Girona (UdG), the University of Lleida (UdL), the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC). However, of all the Spanish universities appearing in this prestigious ranking this year, the UOC is yet again the only one that is an online university. On a global scale, the UOC ranked closely with the United Kingdom's Open University.

The University of Oxford topped the list overall for yet another year, followed in 2021 by Stanford and Harvard.