•Notícia

The 2016 edition of the U-Ranking, which looks at the productivity of the Spanish university system, was made public on 31 March. According to this year's edition, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) is Spain's top university in Innovation and Technological Development and ranks second overall (together with the UAB and the UPV). In teaching, the UPC moved up a position to third place, while in research it lost some ground, though it remains the top-ranked technical university.

The U-Ranking report also includes the results of a study that classifies universities in homogeneous groups based on a series of variables: financial resources, characteristics of the environment they operate in (size and wealth of the market, and level of competition), characteristics of teaching and research staff (seniority, research capacity, international networks), student profile (initial quality of incoming students, foreign students), and the organisational characteristics of the institution (size, degrees offered).

Based on this analysis, seven groups are identified and the UPC is included in the “highly specialised universities” category, along with Pompeu Fabra University, Universitat Politècnica de València, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and the Technical University of Madrid. This is the best-performing group and, as a result, the leading group in the Spanish university system.

The U-Ranking, an indicator system designed to measure the results and productivity of state universities, is produced by the BBVA Foundation and the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (Ivie). The ranking analyses 61 Spanish universities, which together represent over 95% of the university system. It includes 48 public and 13 private universities —two more than the previous edition— that are able to provide the information needed to calculate indicator scores.

The report ranks the institutions in three functional dimensions: teaching performance, research and innovation, and technological development. Each of these dimensions is further broken down into four areas: resources, production, quality and internationalisation. The overall ranking of each university is determined based on its position in these areas. Universities are ranked according to their productivity and the total volume of the results they generate.

The ranking was produced by a large team of researchers and technicians led by Francisco Pérez, Ivie research director, and Joaquín Aldás, a research professor at Ivie (both attached to the University of Valencia), in collaboration with a team of Ivie research technicians. Since the first edition of the U-Ranking was produced, experts on the assessment of university activity and quality from 15 Spanish universities have collaborated on the project.