The world’s youngest universities outperform their older counterparts when it comes to attracting overseas students and publishing international research, according to data used in the 2017 Times Higher Education Young University Rankings. While older institutions tend to be richer and have stronger reputations in teaching and research, THE data show young universities excel when it comes to internationalisation.

Institutions founded from 2000 to the present day (“millennials”) produced the highest proportion of internationally co-authored research, when compared with universities founded during other periods since the Second World War and the full list of institutions in the latest THE World University Rankings, which have a median age of 91. Meanwhile, universities founded between 1986-1999 (“Generation Y”) attracted the highest proportions of international students on average, followed by the millennials cohort.

The findings are based on the median scores for universities of different age groups that feature in the World University Rankings. As well as the millennials and Generation Y cohorts, the analysis calculated the median scores for “Generation X” (1967-1985) and “Golden Age” (1945-1966) universities, as well as for the full 980-strong list. However, some of the millennial institutions, such as the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Antwerp, were established by mergers of older institutions.

In the millennials group, the University of Luxembourg (founded in 2003) and Saudi Arabia’s Alfaisal University (2002) achieved the highest scores for internationalisation, which encompasses metrics on the proportion of international students, staff and research.

Attila Brungs, vice chancellor of the University of Technology, Sydney, which is fifth for internationalisation in the Generation Y group, says the institution focuses on “preparing our students to be global professionals”. More than one-third (35 percent) of students at the institution come from abroad, while a similar proportion of domestic students spend time studying overseas, he says.

The data also show that Generation X universities and the millennials achieved the greatest scores for citation impact on average.