UCI again ranks first among US universities younger than 50
“As we near our 50th anniversary, this recognition shows that we’ve fulfilled the vision articulated by our founding chancellor, Daniel G. Aldrich Jr., when he dedicated the campus,” said current Chancellor Michael V. Drake.
Irvine, Calif., June 19, 2013 – UC Irvine ranked first among U.S. universities under 50 years old – and fifth worldwide – in a report released today by Times Higher Education. It’s the second consecutive year that the campus has ranked in the top five. UC Irvine will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2015 and is the youngest institution in the prestigious Association of American Universities.
“As we near our 50th anniversary, this recognition shows that we’ve fulfilled the vision articulated by our founding chancellor, Daniel G. Aldrich Jr., when he dedicated the campus,” said current Chancellor Michael V. Drake. “He vowed UC Irvine would become a world-class university. Our dedication to excellence in academics, research, and campus character and leadership has enabled UC Irvine to reach that goal. Now we’re focused on soaring even higher as one of the world’s premier public institutions of higher education.”
Performance benchmarks used in the ranking included research and the teaching environment. Special attention was paid to international collaboration, citations of campus research by other scientists, and the degree to which research has spawned technical innovation.
“The Times Higher Education ‘100 Under 50’ rankings highlight institutions like UC Irvine that have become one of the world’s finest in a matter of years, while many of their competitors have had centuries of development, as well as those that are showing great potential for future success,” said Phil Baty, rankings editor.
“The universities ranked are subjected to the same trusted and tough global standards established by the overall Times Higher Education world university rankings, using 13 separate performance indicators covering the whole range of a university’s mission (teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook) but carefully recalibrated to better suit the profile of younger institutions. So this new ranking is a list of some truly exciting and dynamic institutions, and UC Irvine makes the top 10 and takes first place in the U.S.”
One trend evident in this and other world university rankings is the emergence of universities as global collaborators in health and technology research. UC Irvine recently has embarked on a number of collaborative research efforts in Israel, with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
Just this year, Drake also forged agreements with institutions in South Korea: Ewha Womans University, the largest women’s college in the world; Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, consistently ranked as one of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in that nation; and KAIST, the country’s first research-oriented science and engineering university.
“We look forward to continuing our relationships with these institutions, just as we have with many others around the world, including in Norway, Poland and China,” Drake said.
UC Irvine scored in the 90th percentile in research citations. This indicator examines a university’s research influence by capturing the number of times its published works are cited by scholars across the globe. The data are drawn from the 12,000 academic journals indexed by Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science database and include all indexed journals published between 2005 and 2009.
About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Led by Chancellor Michael Drake since 2005, UCI is among the most dynamic campuses in the University of California system, with more than 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 1,100 faculty and 9,400 staff. Orange County’s second-largest employer, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $4.3 billion. For more UCI news, visit wp.communications.uci.edu.
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