Turkey is the top performer in a new pilot Times Higher Education ranking of universities in Central Eurasia, which also demonstrates the strength of flagship institutions in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan.
Koç University takes first place in the table, which analysed 248 higher education institutions from across the region using THE’s World University Rankings methodology. Middle East Technical University and Sabancı University complete the top three.
Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University in joint fourth place and Uzbekistan’s Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanisation in seventh place break up Turkey’s domination of the top 10, while the Azerbaijan State University of Economics is the only other institution outside Turkey to feature in the top 15.
Turkey claims eight places in the top 10, and 16 in the top 20. It is also the most-represented country overall, with 109 ranked institutions.
However, the analysis shows that Kazakhstan is leading the region for international outlook – which measures universities’ share of international students, staff and research publications – with Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, ranked 40th overall, coming first place in this pillar, and Satbayev University, in the 51-60 band overall, following in second.
Earlier this month, the Kazakh minister of science and higher education, Sayasat Nurbek, said the next stages of his country’s development would depend on partnerships with foreign universities in science and technology. Four years ago, Kazakhstan launched a strategy to position itself as an academic hub for the Greater Eurasia region, while Uzbekistan has also made significant progress in this area.
The table is a filter of the THE World University Rankings 2026, including only the five full member states of the Organization of Turkic States: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Uzbekistan. The regional focus allows for more of these institutions to be given distinct ranks, and for more fine-grain bands lower down the table when compared with the global ranking, generating fresh insights on the Central Eurasian region for the first time.
The pilot ranking was created to offer a snapshot of what a new official THE ranking for Central Eurasian universities could look like. THE will consult on which countries to include in the future iteration. The official ranking is also likely to have a lower publication threshold for entry, resulting in a higher number of ranked institutions.
Maia Chankseliani, professor of comparative and international education at the University of Oxford, said that there was “genuine momentum” in Eurasian higher education, particularly in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan where internationalisation policies have expanded university and student numbers.
She said strengths across the region included a “genuine and deep respect for education as a social value…which creates real demand and political will to invest”; young, growing populations; and a “technical foundation in science and engineering that is an inheritance from the Soviet period” and that “still supports capabilities in STEM and related research areas”.
However, Chankseliani said that the region’s universities remained “deeply state-controlled” and that their continued development would benefit from greater autonomy over their finances, curricula and rectoral appointments.
The quality of higher education institutions also varied greatly, she said, making “system-level competition hard”.
“Investments in a handful of flagship universities will not lift the entire system,” she warned.
Phil Baty, THE’s chief global affairs officer, said: “For many centuries, the central Eurasian region shaped the global flow of goods, talent and ideas, and today it is an increasingly prominent – and increasingly important – emerging centre for higher education and research, fuelling new generations of talent and ideas. So Times Higher Education is delighted to focus its unique, trusted data on the region, to offer this fresh spotlight of globally focused research universities making their mark on the world from the region.”
He added that THE would be consulting with the higher education sector on further developing the analysis.
“While this pilot list today is simply filtered from the World University Rankings, we are planning a richer, deeper and more inclusive analysis in future iterations, and urge all ambitious, research-active universities in the region to get involved and share data with us,” he said.
Overall, the pilot table includes 122 ranked universities, plus a further 126 reporter institutions, which provided data but did not meet THE’s eligibility criteria to receive a rank. The universities were assessed across all their core missions – teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook – using 17 weighted metrics.
Top universities in Central Eurasia: pilot ranking
THE considers the below table to be a consultative, pilot ranking for a future, official iteration of the Central Eurasia University Rankings – allowing us to provide a more focused, contextual lens on the region, with more institutions included. Universities are currently eligible to rank in the World University Rankings if they publish 1,000 research papers over a five year period (indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database) but future editions of the Central Eurasia University Rankings are likely to lower this threshold for inclusion. Register your interest at profilerankings@timeshighereducation.com to ensure that you are included in the next edition of the Central Eurasia University Rankings.
Note: Precise ranks and overall scores are shown for the institutions ranked in the top 50. We then display banded ranks and overall scores for institutions in the rest of the table because the difference between their scores is not statistically significant. Precise pillar scores are displayed for each ranked institution.
Institutions that are ranked within bands are listed in alphabetical order. All the universities ranked within the same band have the same position. For instance, if the top two universities in country A are ranked in the same band (51-60), they are both ranked joint first in Country A.