U-Multirank creates a new ‘higher education cooperation index’, to help students in choosing their best matching university

Want to find the best university in a certain field?

Well first off, there’s no such thing as the best university in the world, because what’s best depends on who you are, what you want from your student experience, and even what you want from life. To help students through that process U-Multirank has worked to create a new type of university comparison tool, putting you in the driver’s seat.

The world is full of different people and full of different universities. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. Some things that might be a strength to you – let’s say, a big university, full of people from all over the world – might be a weakness for somebody who might prefer a small, cosy institution that is focused on serving its local region.

Most league tables and rankings ignore the diversity of students and of universities and pretend there’s a single idea of what it means to be good, but that approach ignores your personal needs and preferences as they usually focus heavily on research, or even on the reputation of universities. Instead, U-Multirank is designed to let you decide what’s important to you and find, not the ‘best’, but the best for you.

In its latest publication, U-Multirank expands its functionalities for students to compare universities and study programmes in the areas of cooperation that are most important to them. Students interested in universities that are engaged externally and active in cooperation can now assess them via U-Multirank’s latest ‘higher education cooperation index’ (HECI). The new cooperation index is launched today, as part of U-Multirank's annual publication.

Higher education cooperation index (HECI)

U-Multirank uses both its most recent release as well as its comprehensive data set across several years to present an analysis of collaboration in higher education. Combining a group of its specific indicators, U-Multirank constructed a ‘higher education cooperation index’ which allows an assessment of the tendencies of higher education institutions to engage in cooperative activities with external actors. These external actors are either other higher education institutions, business and industry and other societal and governmental organisations. In addition, cooperative engagements can take place at a regional, national or international level.

The ‘cooperation trends’ are focused on six different variables (partnerships, international joint degrees, educational internships, international co-publications, regional co-publications and co-patents with industry) and compares higher education institutions all around world. These variables are part of U-Multirank’s broad performance categories: teaching & learning, research, knowledge transfer, international orientation and regional engagement. But why is U-Multirank's higher education cooperation index so interesting? Well, because those higher education institutions that cooperate externally more with their local innovation ecosystem and across borders perform better in these U-Multirank indicators than those that do not. The positive effects of cooperation in these categories are related to the specific profiles of the institutions, which demonstrates that universities tend to strategically seek out cooperation in the areas they value most, and in doing so generally perform better than universities that do not.

How does HECI help me find my best matching university?

U-Multirank’s latest results not only give insights on the effects of external cooperation, but as a multi-dimensional global ranking they make transparent the detailed performance of universities, so students can make better informed choices about what, or where to study based on what matters most to them. When deciding on a university, it’s important to make sure that the aims of the institution match your needs and goals - and U-Multirank's HECI can help ensure that. If you’re interested in a university that is well engaged internationally, or has the right contacts for partnerships, then using U-Multirank's new cooperation index can help you find your best match.

At times the deciding factor between your favourite universities can be small, and with U-Multirank, these distinctions are made visible via our web tool.

Are you hesitating between two universities? You may want to look at the following new interactive map of the 100 most cooperative universities worldwide. Explore the map to see how well universities perform in areas of cooperation and filter by countries, or what interests you most: (LINK).

Let U-Multirank help | Resources for students

With a dedicated track just for students, U-Multirank offers a multitude of resources and information just for you. Included in our rankings are the opinions and feedback of more than 100,000 current students who took part in our annual student survey giving valuable peer-to-peer feedback. U-Multirank includes information on nearly 2,000 universities from almost 100 countries worldwide. From this information you can create your own personalised university rankings, comparing them in the areas of teaching & learning, research, knowledge exchange, internationalisation and regional engagement. Particularly for students, U-Multirank offers quick comparisons to help you find your best matching university in just four easy steps. By selecting what and where you want to study and saying which factors are most important to you, we suggest the best matching universities for you based on our comprehensive and comparative data.

Users can also use pre-made rankings (Readymade Rankings) created by our ranking experts for broad categories like, research, internationalisation, teaching & learning, technical universities, etcetera. Another option is that you can also look at our ‘top performing universities’ – these are the highest performing universities on a select group of performance measures and give you a good insight into the specific strengths of these universities.

In addition, U-Multirank offers a wide range of information about student life in different countries and cities, via our ‘universities by countries’ and ‘universities by cities’, as well as our ‘universities by subject’ pages.

As mentioned before, university rankings can’t guarantee that a university is the ‘best’ in the world, but we can help you along the journey to find your best matching university. To do so, you will need to make that choice based on far wider criteria, but we can help with that too. Take a look at our articles about how to choose a university and explore the profiles of the universities recommended by our best-matching university tool.