The latest international university ranking by Times Higher Education (THE) has placed three German universities among the top 50 in the world. In the background, an increasing number of students and academics are rejecting the fairness and motivations of university ranking companies.

THE World University Rankings 2025

Each year, Times Higher Education puts together a list of the best universities in the world according to their assessment. This year’s list examined more than 2.000 universities across 115 countries and territories worldwide.

2025 was the ninth year in a row that the University of Oxford took the top spot in the ranking. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took second place, replacing Harvard in last year’s ranking. 

Harvard moved down to third, while Princeton and Cambridge came in fourth and fifth place respectively, meaning Anglo-American institutions continued to dominate the ranking. However, in 2025, Chinese universities moved closer than ever to making the top 10, with Tsinghua University in Beijing taking 12th place. ETH Zurich was the best-rated university outside the UK and US, placing 11th overall.

TUM, LMU and Heidelberg named top 3 German universities by THE

In the 2025 ranking, the Techincal University of Munich (TUM) came in 26th place, moving up four spaces compared to last year’s assessment. Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (LMU) retained its spot in 38th place, as did Heidelberg University in 47th place, drawing with Zhejiang University in Zhejiang, south of Shanghai.

Further down in the list, Humboldt University in Berlin drew 84th place with the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the University of Bonn came in 89th. RWTH Aachen University, Charité University Hospital Berlin and the University of Tübingen also made it into the top 100.

How does THE decide which universities are “good”?

So what do all of these numbers mean and how can they help prospective students make a decision about where they might like to study in Germany?

With last year’s ranking, THE announced that it was adopting a new methodology for assessing the quality of universities. The publication said that universities would be judged on performance in five areas; teaching, research environment, research quality, international outlook and industry.

But according to Jelena Brankovic, a researcher at the University of Bielefeld whose expertise includes the university ranking industry, these methodologies are, “more like a frontstage distraction from what is actually happening in the backstage of the ranking business”. 

While the first global university rankings were only published in 2003, the number of publishers has shot up in the past 20 years, with the most influential rankings run by four companies, who “collect vast amounts of data from universities and publicly accessible sources, which they then privatise in order to market them to universities, governments, and other interested parties in the form of performance analytics,” according to the United Nations University (UNU).

“Recent research suggests that universities that buy products and services from QS and THE may have better chances of moving up in those rankings,” the UNU explains. As a result, certain universities are opting out of the “race”. In September 2023, the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands announced it would withdraw from the THE ranking and the University of Zurich followed, withdrawing in March 2024.

The UNU has since issued a statement strongly condemning the “wide and uncritical use of global university rankings”, a sentiment with which Brankovic agrees. There are two important things which prospective students should consider when reading ranking, the researcher told IamExpat. “They should not take any information at face value, but approach it with a healthy dose of scepticism” and “should never rely only on one source of information, such as a ranking, but should try to cast a wide net, compare information from various sources, discuss with peers and parents, and assess this against their own preferences.”

10 best universities in the world for 2025, according to THE

In all, here are the 10 best universities in the world, according to THE: 

1. University of Oxford
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
3. Harvard University
4. Princetown University
5. University of Cambridge
6. Stanford University
7. California Institute of Technology
8. University of California, Berkeley
9. Imperial College London
10. Yale University

For more information about the ranking, check out the THE website.

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