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STUDYING IN ITALY

Ranked: Italy’s best universities and how they compare worldwide

Italian universities featured more prominently than ever before in the latest set of prestigious international rankings. Here's a look at the country's top-rated institutions and how they stack up globally.

Published: 8 April 2022 15:17 CEST
Ranked: Italy's best universities and how they compare worldwide
Photo by Samuele Giglio on Unsplash

Good news, at last, for the Italian higher-education system.

The 2022 edition of the prestigious World University Ranking by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) included 56 Italian universities among the 1,543 most distinguished academic institutions worldwide.

This makes the bel paese the seventh most-represented country in the ranking, which is based on criteria including uses peer review, faculty/student ratio and number of citations of published research.

The top 30 places in the international table were dominated by US and UK universities, with the top three places taken by MIT, Oxford, and Stanford.

But Italian universities featured more prominently on the list than ever before, with a total of 507 Italian university courses included: 55 more than in the 2021 ranking.

READ ALSO: What you need to know before a semester abroad in Italy

In comparison to last year’s figures, 104 Italian university courses climbed up the ranking while 210 held their positions and 138 dropped down. 

Italy now boasts an average of 9.1 QS course placements per single university. That is nearly half a point above the European Union average, sitting at 8.7 programmes per university. That puts Italy joint seventh in the table of countries in terms of the number of placements in the rankings, alongside Sweden.

The top 10 Italian universities remain the same this year, with the Polytechnic University of Milan, the University of Bologna and Rome’s La Sapienza leading the pack.

The best Italian universities according to the QS ranking:

  1. Polytechnic University of Milan
  2. University of Bologna 
  3. University of Rome – La Sapienza
  4. University of Padua
  5. University of Milan
  6. Polytechnic University of Turin
  7. University of Pisa
  8. San Raffaele University
  9. University of Naples Federico II
  10. University of Trento

These historic institutions have long been at the forefront of international academic instruction. La Sapienza was ranked the best university in the world for Classics and Ancient History for the third time in its history. The Rome-based institution was also listed as the best Italian university in as many as 15 subjects (that’s seven more compared to last year) with six top-50 courses at an international level. 

La Sapienza’s rector Antonella Polimeni on Thursday praised the “incredible result”, saying that it “rewards the great efforts made by our academic community in all areas of knowledge”.

A number of other Italian institutions stood out for the excellence of their programmes. 

The University of Bologna, which has been ranked the third-best university on Italian soil, boasts as many as 25 top-100 courses internationally, scoring highly in Classic and Ancient History (22nd place), Agriculture and Forestry (40th), Archaeology (44th).

Milan’s Polytechnic, which took the crown for best-ranked Italian university, retained two top-10 courses: Art and Design (5th place) and Architecture (10th). Meanwhile, Milan’s Bocconi University entered the top 10 in Social Sciences and Management. 

The University of Pisa university also overtook Paris’s Sorbonne in the global ranking.

Overall, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was the top-ranked institution, taking the top spot in 12 different subjects.

US universities once again got the best of British ones, snatching the top spot in 28 out of 51 subjects, while UK universities ‘only’ came in first in 13 areas of study, with the University of Oxford first in six of them.

Zurich’s ETH was ranked the best university in continental Europe as the institute scored first in three different subjects.

See the latest QS rankings in full here.

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STUDYING IN ITALY

REVEALED: These are Italy’s best universities in 2024

Italian universities are once again near the top of the international leaderboard for 2024, but the country’s highest-rated institutions vary by subject area.

Published: 17 April 2024 10:26 CEST
REVEALED: These are Italy’s best universities in 2024

As many as 42 Italian universities were included in the esteemed 2024 list from Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) making Italy the seventh highest-ranked country in the world and second in the European Union behind Germany.

Milan’s Polytechnic, Sapienza University, University of Bologna, University of Padua, and Turin’s Polytechnic all came in as the country’s top five tertiary education institutes. 

Sapienza University (La Sapienza) reigns supreme for its fourth year in classics – the Rome-based university beat out the prestigious University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford as being the best in the world for the subject.

Italian universities were awarded 99 positions (three more than in 2023’s edition) for subjects in the five major areas of study including arts and humanities, engineering and technology, life sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences and management.

Arts and humanities

Sapienza University and the University of Bologna both came in 44 and 50 respectively worldwide. Both universities had an overall score of around 80 out of 100.

The other three universities in Italy’s top five for arts and humanities are Milan’s Polytechnic (60), the University of Padua (139), and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (160).

Engineering and technology

Milan’s Polytechnic (23), Turin’s Polytechnic (52), Sapienza University (95) and University of Bologna (100) all ranked in the world’s top 100 for engineering and technology.

Of the four in the top 100, Milan’s Polytechnic leads the way in micro engineering subjects. It comes in at 12th place worldwide for petroleum engineering, 27th for chemical engineering, and 9th for mechanical engineering.

The University of Padua (166) is Italy’s fifth-best university for the subject.

Life sciences

Admittedly, life sciences did not rank as highly as arts and humanities or engineering and technology, though the results are still better than average.

The University of Milan (97), the University of Padua (105), the University of Bologna (110), Sapienza University (128) and the University of Turin (155) were Italy’s top five. 

The University of Milan was ranked as the 80th best university for medicine in the world (the best in Italy), followed by the ever-present University of Bologna which came in at 87. To add, The University of Padua was placed as the 108th in the world for biology.

Natural sciences

Once again, as was the case for arts and humanities, Sapienza University was the star of the class in natural sciences in 61st position globally. 

It was a close call between the University of Bologna and the University of Padua, with Bologna just scraping past its historic rival by one position at 96th place.

Social sciences and management

Private Milan-based university Bocconi led the way in Italy at 16th place overall. Its nearest Italian competitor, University of Bologna, trailed behind at 64th place. Another private university, Luiss University based in Rome, was in 90th position.

Milan’s Polytechnic and Sapienza University were 100th and 128th respectively.

Rest of the world

Aside from classics, mechanical engineering, petroleum engineering, and social sciences and management, Italian universities failed to fall under the top 20 in a fair few subjects.

Compared with the United States, which currently leads in 32 individual subjects with Harvard claiming 19 of them, Italy still has quite a long way to go to get to the top of QS’ rankings.

Nevertheless, coming in second place within the European Union and seventh overall in the world is still a huge success. 

The QS World University Ranking assesses the performance of universities around the world based on recruiters’ feedback, academic peer review, faculty/student ratio and number of published research citations. The full methodology is available here.

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