QS, one of the two largest international university rating organizations, publishes its current world rankings in June each year. This year's rankings were published on Tuesday, with Széchenyi István University featuring for the first time in its history, straight in at position 801–1000. The prestige of the compilation is demonstrated by the fact that the frontrunners are such renowned universities as Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge.

Dr Erzsébet Knáb, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Széchenyi István University Foundation, the controlling authority of Széchenyi University, emphasized: "In recent years the University of Győr has become one of Hungary's leading knowledge centres, and this is confirmed by the current success, which is a huge pleasure for all of us." One element in compiling the list was the perception of universities by employers. "I am proud to say that among the world's seventy-five thousand voting companies invited by QS, the number one industrial partner of Széchenyi István University, Audi Hungaria and the Volkswagen Group, was included. The management cast their vote for an institution whose graduates know how to stand their ground in the labour market conditions created by the world-class automobile plant, as half of the engineers working at Audi in Győr graduated from Széchenyi University,” underlined Dr Knáb.

Dr Erzsébet Knáb

Dr Filep Bálint, President of Széchenyi István University, emphasized that the strategic goal of the University is to strengthen its international competitiveness, which includes student-centred, flexible and innovative education as well as value-creating scientific research. One measure of this is to put the institution to the challenge and to perform well in global rankings. “The current result shows that, based on our excellent colleagues and close corporate partnerships, we provide practice-oriented, high-quality education for our students, who gain the valuable knowledge sought on the job market. This process is also aided by the model change, which results in even greater opportunities for our students and researchers to develop their talents. Our goal is to achieve world-class quality in infrastructure, education and research,” he said.

Dr Bálint Filep

The authors of the QS list take into account academic and corporate judgments of the universities, their teacher-student ratio, their academic performance, and the number of foreign students and lecturers. Looking at the detailed data, it can be stated that Széchenyi István University’s excellent position is mainly due to its excellent corporate reputation and the very good student-lecturer ratio, indicating quality education. Dr Eszter Lukács added that as prelude to the current success, in the previous three years, the University of Győr featured on the QS regional, Eastern European-Central Asian list, reaching position 173, an improvement of 28 places over the previous result.

“QS lists about some one thousand three hundred universities in its world rankings. It is a huge achievement for our institution to be among the top thousand of the more than twenty-five thousand universities on Earth. This is also important to us because the strategic goal of our institution is to increase its global visibility, to which we want to attract as many international students as possible. Young people overseas living in our priority target areas pay close attention to which universities are on the QS list, and there are even countries where the government specifically links support for higher education studies abroad to this,” said Dr Eszter Lukács.

Dr Eszter Lukács