Thirty Spanish universities, headed by Barcelona, are among the thousand best in the world according to the Shanghai 2026 list, compared to 36 last year, since eight have fallen compared to 2025, but two new ones have been incorporated, the Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid) and the University of Valladolid.
The most famous university classification, published this Saturday, has revealed the losses of the University of Cantabria, Balearic Islands, Jaén, Lleida, Carlos III of Madrid, Cádiz, Córdoba and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, which do not appear this year in the ranking.
The University of Valladolid has once again taken part in this edition, after disappearing from the list last year.
Some of these university centers improve their position and others worsen it compared to the 2025 world ranking, in which Barcelona maintains its leadership, followed by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Complutense University, the Autonomous University of Madrid and Granada.
Spain is in 23rd place in the list by country, which lists the number of universities in each section of the ranking: one among the top 200; three among the 300; seven among the 400; 12 among the 500, and 30 among the 1,000.
Once again, no Spanish university appears among the hundred best positioned on the list dominated by the US.
The classification, which has been carried out among more than 2,500 higher education institutions, is ordered by sections, in which they are positioned alphabetically according to their initials in English.
The University of Barcelona, leader of the Spanish list
This year, the ranking of Spanish educational centers has experienced some changes compared to the previous one, but the University of Barcelona maintains the status of the previous two years by being among the top 200 positions, its best classification.
Among the top ten, the Autonomous of Barcelona and the Complutense improve their sections in both cases (to 201-300 of the best), while in the 301-400 range the Autonomous of Madrid, Granada, Basque Country remains, with the exception of Valencia, which has dropped to this range from 201-300 last year.
Of this Spanish 'Top 10', in the 401-500 range are the Polytechnic of Valencia, the Pompeu Fabra - which has dropped from 301-400 - and that of Navarra, which has risen from 501-600.
Of the total, thirteen are located in the same section, six improve it and nine worsen it, with the most notable drop in the case of the University of Salamanca, from 501-600 to 801-900.
Those that improve are the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Complutense, Navarra, Zaragoza, the Polytechnic of Madrid and Jaume I, compared to those that worsen, such as the cases of Valencia, Pompeu Frabra, Murcia, Alcalá, Oviedo, Salamanca, Rovira i Virgili, Alicante and Vigo.
Those of Barcelona, the Autonomous University of Madrid, Granada, the Basque Country, the Polytechnic of Valencia, Seville, Santiago Compostela, the Polytechnic of Catalonia, Extremadura, La Laguna, Málaga, Castilla-La Mancha and Girona remain in the same section.
Harvard in the lead once again
The list is headed, as last year, by Harvard University, for 24 consecutive years, Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the top ten are completed by Cambridge, Berkeley, Princeton, Oxford, Columbia, the University of Chicago and Caltech.
At the European level, the United Kingdom has 57, Germany 51, Italy 42, France 27, the Netherlands 13, Sweden 12, Austria 11, Switzerland 9, Belgium 8 and Denmark 6, among others.
In continental Europe, Paris-Saclay is the first and remains the leader in 13th place, followed by ETH Zurich, in 19th.
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), better known as the Shanghai classification, has been published since 2003 and is updated each year by Jiao Tong University, located in that same Chinese city.
The list analyzes six indicators: number of students who have won a Nobel or the Fields Medal; professors with Nobel or Fields; quotes from researchers; articles in Nature and Science, academic performance per capita, and works in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Science Citation Index.
