International ranking 2025: Hong Kong extends its lead

View the full list of the world’s most international universities 2025

Hong Kong is the breakaway leader in this year’s Times Higher Education international ranking, mainly thanks to its relationship with its massive neighbour.

Hong Kong claimed all top four spots in the 2025 ranking, with a fifth institution notching 11th place. All five moved up the leader board – apart from City University of Hong Kong, which had nowhere to rise to as it topped the ranking for the second time in a row.

Heavyweight research nations like the US, China, Germany and France predictably dominated the ranking of 217 institutions. But most saw their performance slide, with far more institutions moving down the table than up – particularly American, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and South Korean institutions.

Exceptions to this trend were the UK and Australia, both of which had considerably more institutions moving up than down – albeit not their frontrunners. The University of Oxford slipped to sixth from third in 2024, while the Australian National University (ANU) fell from joint 15th to 22nd place.

Top 10 most international universities in the world 2025

No such misfortune befell Hong Kong’s universities. They always perform well in the international ranking, partly because student and staff recruits from mainland China are deemed international for ranking purposes.

This year, Hong Kong institutions did even better, principally because of across-the-board rises in their co-authorship score – a metric based on the share of journal articles with international authors.

Co-authorship scores for all five ranked Hong Kong universities improved this year. The tally of journal articles collaboratively written by Hong Kong and mainland Chinese authors increased by about 70 per cent between 2019 and 2023, the data shows.

Meanwhile, co-authorship scores declined at many other countries’ top-placed institutions including Oxford, ANU, Canada’s University of British Columbia, Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, Austria’s University of Vienna and the Netherlands’ Delft University of Technology.

Hiroshima University international education expert Futao Huang said Hong Kong universities had always been popular with outsiders, and this had been intensified by “broader geopolitical shifts” such as restrictions on academic exchanges and artificial intelligence rivalry between China and the West.

Huang said mainland Chinese academics were attracted by Hong Kong’s English language environment, which boosted their prospects of publishing in internationally recognised journals. “The increase in co-authorship scores…can likely be attributed to the growing presence of mainland Chinese academics in Hong Kong universities,” he said.

“Many of them maintain strong research ties with their home institutions in mainland China, contributing to a rise in joint publications.”

Huang said Hong Kong universities had positive “peer perception” and a “relatively open and well-resourced research environment”, bolstered by their “historical positioning” as intermediaries between East and West. “While political uncertainties remain, their established reputation and international networks continue to provide them with an advantage in attracting global talent and fostering transnational collaborations.”

Of the 40 countries whose institutions appeared in this year’s ranking, just eight improved on earlier efforts, including Chinese neighbours Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan.

Australia, UK and the Netherlands also did better, but their success may prove short-lived. Next year’s ranking will include data from 2024, when the three countries’ governments unleashed policies to discourage international students.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com

Methodology

The THE list of the world’s most international universities is based on data collected for the THE World University Rankings 2025. It is based on four equally weighted metrics:

• Proportion of international staff
• Proportion of international students
• Proportion of international co-authorship (the share of a university’s total research journal publications between 2019 and 2023 that have at least one international co-author, normalised to account for an institution’s subject mix)
• Proportion of international reputation (the share of votes from outside the home country that the institution achieved in THE’s annual Academic Reputation Survey, which asks leading scholars to name the world’s best universities for teaching and research in their fields).

Only institutions that were ranked in the World University Rankings 2025 and received at least 400 votes in the reputation survey were eligible for inclusion. To be included, universities also had to receive at least 200 domestic votes or at least 10 per cent of the available domestic votes. Once universities are ranked in the international list, they are only excluded if they do not meet the vote thresholds for two consecutive years.