Safa Jafari Safa, Office of Communications, communications@aub.edu.lb
In its 21st edition, the
2025 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings (WUR): Top Global Universities ranked the American University of Beirut (AUB) in the top 17 percentile among ranked universities worldwide. Released on June 4, 2024, and considered the most relevant university ranking, the QS WUR placed AUB first in Lebanon, eighth in the MENA region, and 250th globally out of 1,503 ranked institutions.
AUB's performance, both in general and in specific areas, is indicative of its continued commitment to producing impactful research and highly employable graduates, despite the challenges faced by the university, Lebanon, and the Levant.
QS assessed universities using nine performance indicators: academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, faculty-student ratio, international faculty ratio, and international-student ratio. Added to these were the three new metrics that were introduced last year: sustainability, employment outcomes, and international research network (IRN).
Consistency in Leadership
On the global scale, AUB has world-leading employment outcome results (ranked at #35 worldwide and #4 in the MENA region) with a significant gap between AUB and the rest of domestic and regional institutions. This would enable AUB to act as a case study for the wider region providing a template for best practice in Employment Outcomes.
In the intensely competitive global job market, employability and career opportunities are consistently rated as high priority by university students. Consequently, AUB is committed to ensuring a high level of employability for its graduates while nurturing future leaders. This commitment underscores AUB's potential to provide a significant career boost.
Despite a notable increase in research productivity across various regions covered by QS, AUB witnessed another rank rise of 50 spots in its "Citations per Faculty" indicator. AUB's citations have increased by 17 percent over the last six years (2018-2023) and the ratio value has risen by 16 percent (from 84 to 99.8).
Nationally, and in comparison with Lebanese peer-institutions, AUB ranked first in citations per faculty, employment outcomes, international research network, and sustainability.
On the regional scale, AUB is ranked first in sustainability and among the top 20 in the International Research Network (IRN), enabling it to share wider learnings. There is a significant disparity between AUB's performance in sustainability and that of other institutions in the Middle East. Additionally, AUB is placed in the top two institutions in the Middle East within the top 200 in the world for sustainability ranking.
AUB's Nature Index Performance
AUB's
Nature Index in the current annual tables increased from 3.81 to 4.22 (from February 2023 to January 2024). Nature Index is a prestigious metric that tracks authors' contributions to research articles published in high-quality natural science and health science journals. Nature Index's transparent metric, or “share", is a fraction that accounts for both the proportion of authors from an institution or country/region and the number of institutions involved in a publication. This approach aims to reduce bias by distributing actual collaboration among institutions.
In 2020-21, AUB, which serves as a pillar of a society committed to caring for its most vulnerable members, faced unprecedented and complex economic crises in Lebanon. Despite these challenges, AUB made a remarkable recovery. Its excellence in high-quality research, collaboration, and real-world impact was once again recognized in the Nature Index's open database, which offers independent, data-rich reporting on authors' affiliations, and institutional relationships.
Other recent rankings include: