The U-Ranking project is a joint initiative of the BBVA Foundation and the Ivie that is part of their long history of collaboration to generate information and develop analyses on relevant social and economic problems.
U-Ranking is a project developed jointly by the BBVA Foundation and the Ivie with the aim of analyzing the performance of Spanish universities and providing comparable and synthetic images of these.
As a result of this work, every year U-Ranking publishes a ranking of Spanish universities, based on the study of the universities’ activities in teaching and research and innovation.
The first edition of U-Ranking was published in 2013 with information on the 48 public universities in Spain. In 2024, after twelve editions, 70 Spanish universities are analyzed, including 48 public and 22 private universities. Nearly 3,600 official degrees from these universities are compared using the Choose University tool.
What does the U-Ranking project offer?
U-Ranking offers five important contributions that make it an accurate, user-friendly and practical tool for decision-makers and experts in higher education, for students and for career counselors by:
1. Classifying universities according to both their performance (U-Ranking) and their volume of results (U-Ranking Volume), taking into account the size.
2. Examining the two dimensions that make up the main mission of universities, i.e. teaching, and research and innovation, and providing rankings for each area.
3. Taking into account the different specialization of each university and the different results in each area of study when assessing university activity.
4. Offering rankings for different bachelor’s degree programs, providing a very practical and user-friendly tool to choose the university in which to study.
5. Allowing users to obtain a personalized ranking by responding to the questions “what to study”, “where” and “what are your preferences for education and research”.
The U-Ranking rankings
U-Ranking provides multiple university rankings, depending on whether university activity is viewed from a global perspective or in a specific dimension (teaching, or research and innovation) and whether it is done from the perspective of the performance achieved (U-Ranking) by each university or their total volume of results (U-Ranking Volume). In addition, the “Choose a university” tool allows users to build their own ranking of bachelor’s degrees, based on their preferences on area of study, geographical location and academic orientation.
The BBVA Foundation expresses the corporate social responsibility of the BBVA Group, in particular, its commitment to the advancement of the societies where it conducts its business activity. Their responsibility and commitment have given rise to an extensive body of work in diverse knowledge areas.
The Valencian Institute of Economic Research (Ivie) aims to develop, foster and project economic research at a national and international level.
Team
U-Ranking 2024 project has been carried out by the following Ivie team members:
Universitat de València e Ivie
Universitat de València e Ivie
Ivie
Ivie
Ivie
Ivie
Ivie
Ivie
Ivie
The following Ivie researchers, professors and technicians have participated in past editions: Francisco Goerlich, José Manuel Pastor, Vicent Cucarella, Abel Fernández, Héctor García, María Moraga, Antonio Pantoja, Juan Pérez and Inés Rosell.
Collaboration with Alianza 4 Universidades (IUNE Group)
The Ivie collaborates with members of the IUNE Observatory, belonging to Alianza 4U, in all matters related to research data and transfer, particularly in the area of Bibliometrics. The IUNE Observatory is the result of work carried out by a group of researchers from the universities that make up the «Allianza 4U» (Carlos III University of Madrid, Autonomous University of Madrid, Autonomous University of Barcelona and Pompeu Fabra University). The general coordinator of IUNE is Elías Sanz-Casado, professor at the Department of Librarianship and Documentation of the Carlos III University of Madrid and director of the Research Institute for Higher Education & Science (INAECU).