Paris-Saclay University has been named the European Union's top-ranked higher education institution in the Shanghai 2024 Academic Ranking of World Universities, or ARWU.

Paris-Saclay, which was listed in 12th place in the annual ranking that was first produced in 2003 and that grades universities based on academic and research performance, was joined in the top 50 by seven other EU universities.

The Paris-based institution's achievement was hailed by President Emmanuel Macron, who wrote on the X social media platform: "Paris-Saclay is magical! Never before has a French university been ranked so highly in the prestigious Shanghai Ranking: 12th in the world."

The university had been 15th in last year's ARWU listing.

While Paris-Saclay was the top-ranked university from an EU member nation, it was not the highest-ranked institution in Europe because non-EU member the United Kingdom had two institutions in the top 10 – Cambridge and Oxford, which were fourth and sixth, respectively.

The other eight universities in the top 10 were all from the United States.

The UK had 63 universities in the top 1,000, with the University of Manchester, at 52nd, hailing the achievement and also drawing attention to the fact that all listings have a degree of subjectivity.

Professor Duncan Ivison, the University of Manchester's president and vice-chancellor, said on the university's website: "While they don't measure everything we value, what these rankings demonstrate is our consistent position as one of Europe's leading universities. But, for a university of our scale and ambition, they also serve as a reminder that we need pay attention to our global performance and work collectively to improve across everything we do to retain our position as a world-leading institution."

Among EU universities in the top 50, the University of Copenhagen placed 32nd, the Paris Sciences et Lettres University was 33rd, Sorbonne University was 41st, and Sweden's Karolinska Institute landed in 43rd place.

The EU had 135 universities in the top 500, which was more than the US and more than China, which had 114 and 91, respectively.

The ARWU listing is one of several rankings published each year, including the Times Higher Education listing and the CWTS Leiden ranking.

France's Le Monde newspaper noted that the ARWU listing, which is compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is dominated by English-speaking universities, and favors institutions with a focus on research in the hard sciences, with US giants Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology consistently finishing in the first three places.

The rankings also take into account whether alumni and faculty members have won prestigious awards, such as Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, and whether they have produced cited research, or had papers published in leading magazines, including Nature and Science.

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