UB moves up in world university rankings, says Times Higher Education

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Times Higher Education has again named the University at Buffalo as one of the world’s top 200 universities.

UB is ranked 176th in the 2013-14 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, up from last year’s ranking of 198. The ranking assesses the performance of the world’s best research universities, using 13 performance indicators to analyze how well universities are doing in core missions of teaching, research, faculty citations, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

In the North American region, UB is ranked 74th.

Times Higher Education is a leading higher education magazine based in London. The data for the rankings were collected by Thomson Reuters, which considered about 700 institutions in 69 countries.

According to the ranking methodology, UB ranked particularly high in faculty citations, which examines “research influence” by capturing the number of times a university's published work is cited by scholars globally.  The citations indicate how much each university is contributing to the sum of human knowledge, according to Times Higher Education. “They tell us whose research has stood out, has been picked up and built on by other scholars and, most importantly, has been shared around the global scholarly community to push further the boundaries of our collective understanding, irrespective of discipline.”

UB also ranked highly in international outlook, which examines diversity on campus and to what degree faculty collaborate with international colleagues on research projects – “both signs of how global an institution is in its outlook,” according to Times Higher Education.

UB enrolled 29,940 students this fall, a record-setting number that reflects UB’s growing reputation as a world-class research university where students have the opportunity to work alongside top scholars and learn in a vibrant and diverse academic environment.

At the undergraduate level, UB enrolled about 3,700 freshmen, one of the largest freshman classes in university history.  For the first time, UB graduate enrollments exceeded 10,000 students, with new graduate enrollments at an all-time high, consistent with the university’s core mission of educating leaders in a wide range of fields and advancing understanding in those areas.

With an enrollment of more than 4,800 international students, UB is one of the most globalized campuses in the United States. The university also has consistently earned recognition for offering an excellent, affordable education. During a visit to campus in August, President Barack Obama cited the university’s commitment to ensuring that students graduate with little or no debt.

In September, UB placed ninth in the U.S. News and World Report’s most recent ranking of universities nationwide that graduate students with the least debt, while also earning the 51st spot on the magazine’s list of best public universities.