Leading universities in the region are generally characterized by improving ranking positions in QS’s newly published university rankings. While last year there were strikingly many Austrian, Finnish, Polish and so on. institution placement has deteriorated, and now we see a sort of correction: almost all universities in the region have maintained or even improved their QS ranking. Among the Hungarian universities University of Szeged was one worse, ELTE one better.
It is impressive to see the progress made by previously ranked universities: all Austrian universities have achieved a better positions, most of them with a large improvement of 10-15%. The Finns are in a worse position than last year, but Helsinki and Aalto did not deteriorate further. At Charles University (Prague), the deterioration of the last half decade seems to have stopped, returning to the level four years ago, while the other two leading universities in the post-Soviet sphere, the Polish Jagello and Warsaw University, have returned to the same level eighty places ahead!), and this change (significantly lower) is shown in Sofia and Zagreb. As it is unlikely that the performance of universities in different countries with completely different profiles is likely to be either methodological or some more general factor (this indicates that several Polish universities that have not been ranked before are included in the list of thousands). Belgrade, Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Bratislava did not change their position, but Slovenian universities are improving after a few years of stagnation.
Most Hungarian institutions do not experience a change of trend, most of them (University of Debrecen 601-650, Budapest Technical University and Corvinus University 801-1000) retain their position last year. ELTE was one category ahead (ie 651-700 in the group two years ago), while University of Szeged returned to the second half of the globally ranked thousand institutional group after its more favorable position last year (470), but now in the 501-510 group – but it also retained the best ranked Hungarian institution.
Therefore, assuming international competition, the ranking of Hungarian universities in terms of rankings continued to increase, both with those of the more advanced higher education systems (Austria, Finland) and the leading universities in our region, while we were able to remain in the second group.