Top rankings in 15 disciplines

In the summer of 2020, ETH Zurich again took sixth place in the QS World University Rankings, which compares universities around the world. ETH Zurich succeeded in retaining its title as the best university in continental Europe. Recently, QS published a version of its rankings that evaluates individual disciplines, rather than universities overall. Here, too, ETH Zurich has performed strongly: the university ranks among the top ten in 15 different disciplines, and has taken the absolute top spots again in Earth & Marine Sciences, Geology and Geophysics.

Third-best centre of education in the world

The QS rankings by discipline not only awarded high marks to ETH Zurich as an institution but also to Switzerland overall as a centre of education: A total of 29 Swiss university programmes rank among the top ten in their respective fields. Despite being a smaller country, Switzerland offers six percent of all top-ten education programmes in the world. Only the United Kingdom (26%) and the United States (47%) have a higher concentration of outstanding departments. Switzerland’s 29 top-ranking programmes are dispersed among 12 different universities, with over half of them at ETH Zurich.

“We are proud that ETH Zurich and Switzerland’s universities consistently rank so highly and in such a wide range of disciplines,” says ETH Zurich President Joël Mesot. “This success is not least owing to the outstanding overall conditions and direct investment made in the areas of research, teaching and knowledge transfer – which Switzerland has been doing for decades,” explains Mesot.