Shanghai Rankings 2023: Success of France's New University Models

"Once again, the 2023 awards showcase the commitment of French researchers and teacher-researchers on the international stage." Following in the footsteps of the French Minister of Higher Education, a number of leading institutional players reacted on X (formerly Twitter) to the announcement of these rankings, starting with the President of the Republic who, addressing "the players in education and research," believes that they are making "France a great nation for training, research and innovation." The Prime Minister reacted in the same way, noting that "our universities do us credit!"

Four Universities in the Top 100

In great detail, out of the 1,000 institutions ranked, France is mentioned  27 times, including 4 times in the Top 100.

In 15th place, the University of Paris-Saclay tops the list of French institutions, and is also the leading European institution in the rankings, moving up one place from the previous year. As pointed out by the Minister, the ranking of Paris-Saclay, a university created in 2019, "enables France to retain its 3rd world ranking for the fourth consecutive year, based on the number of institutions in the Top 20", after the United States and the United Kingdom.

Paris-Saclay is followed by three other universities, which have recorded "remarkable progress at the highest level of the  rankings," in the words of the Minister. These are:

• Paris Sciences Lettres (41st position), created/built by the integration of eleven academic and research institutions, with the support of three research organizations;

• Sorbonne Université (46th), born in 2018 from the merger of the universities Paris-Sorbonne and Pierre-et-Marie-Curie; and

• Université Paris Cité (68th), created in 2019 as an experimental institution and resulting from the merger of the universities Paris-Descartes and Paris-Diderot and the integration of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP).

14 Institutions in the Top 500

More than two-thirds of the institutions, located throughout France, distinguished by the Shanghai rankings are placed in the top half of the rankings, i.e., in the Top 500.

This is the case for 14 institutions:

• Université Grenoble-Alpes (between 101st and 150th place),

• Aix-Marseille Université (151-200),

• Université de Montpellier (151-200),

• Université de Strasbourg (151-200),

• Université Lyon 1 – Claude Bernard (201-300),

• Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (201-300),

• Université de Bordeaux (201–300),

• Université de Lorraine (201-300),

• Institut Polytechnique de Paris (301-400),

• Université Toulouse 3 – Paul Sabatier (301-400),

• Université de Lille (301-400),

• Université Toulouse 1 – Capitole (301-400), and

• Université Côte d'Azur (401-500), which recorded an improvement of 200 places, and Université de Rennes (401-500) with an identical progression.

Beyond that, between the 501st and 1,000th places, there are still nine French institutions, such as Université Clermont-Auvergne, INSA Toulouse, Université de Bourgogne, Université de Nantes, Ecole des Hauts Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Université Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne, Université de Savoie, Montpellier Business School and Université de Poitiers (which enters the ranking this year).

Success of France's New University Models

According to Sylvie Retailleau, France's Minister of Higher Education and Research, these rankings demonstrate "the success of France's new university models":

• among the ranked institutions, 12  are the result of the "grouping policy" (following  the 2018 law on experimenting with new forms of bringing together, grouping or merging higher education and research institutions);

• all eight French universities ranked in the Top 200 have benefited from funding under various "investment programs for the future" for more than 10 years. Those fundings "has contributed to the structural transformation of the institutions, the enrichment of their training offer and the definition of their scientific authorship";

• 14 ranked institutions are "carriers of an initiative of excellence," one of the "levers made available, in particular within the framework of the research programming law," that prove "essential for the recognition of the scientific potential of French universities in the years to come."

A Research-based Methodology

Since 2003, China's Jiao Tong University and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) have been producing a globally recognized ranking publication, which primarily assesses the commitment of institutions of higher education to research activities. According to many observers, this ranking system mainly benefits Anglo-Saxon institutions.

Its purpose is to identify the world's 1,000 best universities according to six main criteria: the number of Nobel Prize- and Fields Medal-winning alumni, the number of Nobel Prize- and Fields Medal-winning professors, the number of cited researchers, the number of articles published in journals such as Nature and Science, the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index-Expanded and Social Science Citation Index, as well as the academic performance of professors.