In this year’s QS World University Rankings: Europe, published on January 28, 2026, and based on the evaluation of 958 institutions from 42 countries – nearly 300 more than in the previous edition – the University of Szeged improved its position by nine places, ranking 219th in Europe.
QS also produced a regional subranking focusing on Eastern Europe, assessing 175 universities from eight countries. In this list, SZTE advanced to 10th place, while ranking second nationally among 17 Hungarian institutions. In both rankings, the University of Szeged improved its position by one place compared with the previous year.
When compiling the rankings, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) evaluated universities across 12 indicators, namely: academic reputation (30 percent), citations per publication (10 percent), publications per faculty member (5 percent), employer reputation (15 percent), graduate employment outcomes and the number of highly influential alumni in their fields (5 percent), faculty-to-student ratio (5 percent), international diversity of research collaborations (10 percent), the proportion of international faculty and researchers (5 percent), the proportion and diversity of international students (5 percent), outbound and inbound student mobility (2.5 percent each), as well as efforts related to social and environmental sustainability (5 percent).
The top three institutions in the QS rankings are the University of Oxford, ETH Zurich, and Imperial College London. The top 20 also include several universities with which SZTE maintains close academic partnerships. Among them are Lund University, ranked 12th, and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, ranked 17th – both partners of the University of Szeged within the EUGLOH alliance, which brings together nine leading European universities. Other prominent institutions with which SZTE has extensive joint publication activity include the University of Cambridge (5th), King’s College London (7th), Université PSL (8th), and the University of Glasgow (19th), among others.
