According to the QS WUR 2021, VNU features in Group 801-1,000 best universities globally for the third consecutive time. Although its overall ranking remains unchanged, VNU’s scores keep increasing, which improves its absolute ranking. Specifically, in the two previous rankings, VNU ranked among 78.5% (2019) and 74.9% (2020) of the world top universities. In this ranking, VNU ranks among 67.5% of the world's leading universities.

The QS WUR 2021 ranked 1,002 universities out of 1,604 evaluated educational institutions from 93 countries and territories. Forty- seven institutions participated in this ranking for the first time. This ranking results were based on 1.6 million scholar nominations and 310,000 employer nominations, collected from 102,500 scholars’ responses and 52,000 employers’ responses globally, and the analysis of 138 million citations (from 2014 to 2019) from 18 million articles (from 2014 to 2018).

Among this year’s ranking metrics, VNU's academic reputation has significantly increased, becoming the highest score of VNU (in the top 500+ globally). This shows that the international status and scientific prestige of VNU are increasing and widely- recognized by partners.

QS WUR ranks universities according to 6 metrics, including: Academic Reputation (40%), Employer Reputation (10%), Citations per Faculty (20%), Faculty/Student Ratio (20%), International Faculty Ratio (5%) and International Student Ratio (5%). QS's ranking metrics emphasize the university’s contribution to and training and research quality impact on society (through evaluation of domestic and foreign enterprises and scholars) together with its contribution to scientific research activities (through citations per faculty).