The European Union plans to publish a worldwide ranking of universities next year that it hopes will rival existing global league tables. The aim is to boost the place of European universities in the Shanghai Jiao Tong and Times Higher Education ranking systems, both dominated by US institutions.

In the last Shanghai Jiao Tong ranking, the whole of continental Europe had only 23 universities in the top 100. Yet Europe has some 4,000 universities and colleges that enrol more than 19 million students and employ1.5 million staff.

The new European rankings are being developed following acceptance early last year of a tender from a German, Dutch, Belgian and French consortium called CHERPA, a European network of leading institutions in this field.

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