Saudi Universities Are Climbing the Rankings. Saudi Schools Are Not.

Saudi Arabia has a university inside the world’s top 100 and roughly three in ten fifteen-year-olds who can do basic mathematics. Saudi Arabia’s education quality rankings and its school results now point in opposite directions. King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) ranked 63rd in the QS World University Rankings 2027, published in June 2026, with 22 Saudi institutions in the table [S1]. In the OECD’s PISA 2022 assessment, 30% of Saudi 15-year-olds reached Level 2 proficiency in mathematics — the baseline at which a student can work out which of two routes is shorter — against an OECD average of 69% [S2]. Both figures are correct. They describe the same education system.

That divergence is the subject of this analysis. The university league tables have moved sharply upward over a decade. The assessments that measure what schoolchildren can actually do have barely moved, and in one case moved backwards. The two series are almost never reported together, because university rankings arrive as press releases and school results arrive as OECD and IEA data files.

The gap matters more here than in most countries, because the transformation is explicitly a human-capital bet — the Human Capability Development Programme exists to close it. And the labour-market framing that usually accompanies these numbers, a shortage of Saudi workers, is wrong. There is no supply problem. There is a quality problem.

Last verified: 31 July 2026.

How Do Saudi Universities Rank Globally?

Higher than at any point in the Kingdom’s history, with the gains concentrated in specific institutions and indicators.

Sources: QS via SPA and Gulf Insider [S1]; QS World University Rankings 2026 release [S3]; Times Higher Education institution pages [S4]; ShanghaiRanking institution profiles [S5].

KFUPM’s rise is the headline. It ranked 101st in the QS 2025 edition, 67th in 2026 — the first Arab university ever placed in the global top 100 — and 63rd in 2027 [S1][S3][S6]. QS placed it 85th globally on citations per faculty, and Saudi Arabia as a whole recorded the region’s largest improvement on that indicator and on international research network, with 73% of its ranked universities climbing on both [S3]. KFUPM reports a 93% employability rate on the National Labor Observatory’s measure, an average 4.8 months to first employment and a starting salary near SAR10,600 ($2,827) [S6].

King Saud University’s line is more complicated. It reached 90th in the 2024 Academic Ranking of World Universities — the first Saudi entry into that table’s top 100, written up in the Saudi Medical Journal in April 2025 as evidence of “strategic government investment” [S7]. One edition later it sits in the 101–150 band [S5].

What Saudi Arabia’s education quality rankings actually measure

King Abdulaziz University’s line tells you what the indicators are made of. In ARWU 2025 it sits at 501–600, having been inside the top 200 two editions earlier [S5][S8]. Its ShanghaiRanking indicator scores explain the fall precisely: publications (PUB) 41.6, per-capita performance 11.4, Nature and Science papers 5.1 — and highly cited researchers (HiCi) 0.0 [S5]. The volume indicators held. The citation-elite indicator went to zero.

KAUST, the graduate research university at Thuwal, runs the other way on the same measure. It does not appear in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, which restricts eligibility to institutions teaching undergraduates, but it placed 16 scientists on Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers 2025 list — up from 14 in 2024 — out of a Saudi total of 27 [S9].

Why Are Saudi Universities Rising in the Rankings?

Two mechanisms are documented, they are different from each other, and neither explains the whole picture. Read this section with care: the bibliometrics literature establishes patterns and institutional responses, not intent.

What the bibliometrics literature documents

The affiliation mechanism. The number of Highly Cited Researchers whose primary affiliation was a Saudi institution rose from 27 in 2014 to 109 in 2022 [S10]. In 2022, 75% of them also listed a foreign secondary affiliation — 81% at King Abdulaziz University, 82% at King Saud University, 41% at KAUST — against a rate SIRIS Academic described as “over 5 times higher” than benchmark nations [S10]. Forty-four were listed as research fellows rather than primary employees. SIRIS calculated that a single additional highly cited researcher “might result in a university gaining more than 100 places” in ARWU [S10].

EL PAÍS published the underlying reporting on 2 April 2023, documenting Spanish scientists who declared a Saudi primary affiliation while working in Spain; the chemist Rafael Luque was subsequently suspended by the University of Córdoba after switching his primary affiliation to King Saud University [S11][S12]. Nature and Science both covered the practice the same year, reporting cash inducements [S13][S14]. The retrieval of both articles was blocked to automated access, so the figures above are taken from SIRIS Academic’s own analysis and from Revista Pesquisa FAPESP, which read them [S12].

What the ranking bodies then did. Clarivate revised its Highly Cited Researchers methodology for the 2023 list, excluding roughly 1,000 candidates against about 500 the previous year, adding filters for unusually high publication counts, excessive self-citation and anomalous co-author citations, and for the first time excluding researchers found to have committed misconduct in formal proceedings [S15]. David Pendlebury of Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information described the change as having “added more filters and checks to our analysis” [S14]. The count of Saudi-primary HCRs fell from 109 to 76 in a single year — the largest single-year drop for any country in a decade — and King Abdulaziz University’s own count fell from 31 to 12 [S10]. ShanghaiRanking had already stopped counting secondary affiliations [S12]. KAUST’s count rose from 15 to 18 across the same transition [S10].

The authorship mechanism. This is separate, more recent, and involves a different set of institutions. Lokman Meho and Elie Akl published a study in Quantitative Science Studies on 5 January 2025 examining 14 universities with abnormal publication growth. Six were Saudi: Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, King Khalid University, King Saud University, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University and Taif University. Across the 14, publications rose 234% in four years while first-authorship rates fell 23 percentage points, and the number of hyperprolific authors — those publishing 40 or more papers a year — rose from 23 to 177. Multi-affiliation ran at 18% against 6% in control universities. None of the 14 universities responded to requests for comment [S16]. The journal blocked automated retrieval; these figures are as reported by Retraction Watch, which read the paper.

Meho extended the work in 2025 with the Research Integrity Risk Index (RI²), which scores institutions on retraction rates and reliance on journals delisted from Scopus or Web of Science. The study group of 18 fast-growing universities included nine Saudi institutions: King Khalid, King Saud, Najran, Prince Sattam, Princess Nourah, Taif, Umm Al-Qura, Ha’il and Tabuk. Their research output grew between 220% and 965% against a Saudi national average of 170%, and their first-authorship rates fell an average of 46% against a national decline of 21%. Seventeen of the 18 fell into the RI² “Red Flag” tier; six of eight control institutions were classified low risk [S17].

Two details in that study cut against a simple national indictment. KAUST was used as one of the stable, high-performing comparators, not as a flagged institution. And neither KFUPM nor King Abdulaziz University appears in the study group at all — KFUPM, the university that actually made the top 100, is absent from both bibliometric studies.

What the literature does not establish

It does not establish fraud, and its authors are explicit about that. The RI² paper states its limitations directly: the study “is diagnostic, not causal,” its indicators “cannot capture full ethical nuance,” and “anomalies should be seen as signals of systemic misalignment, not proof of misconduct” [S17]. SIRIS Academic flagged an entire category of cases where it “is not clear” whether a researcher’s Saudi primary affiliation was legitimate or the product of a switch [S10]. Meho and Akl present falling first authorship as suggestive rather than conclusive [S16].

Nor does it establish that ranking gains are only an artefact. Saudi gross domestic expenditure on research and development reached 0.64% of GDP in 2024, up 30.4% on the year from SAR22.61bn ($6.02bn) in 2023, with 36,832 researchers on GASTAT’s count [S18]. Something real is being built alongside whatever else was happening.

What the universities themselves say

Very little, on the record. No substantive published response to the 2023–2025 bibliometric findings from the Ministry of Education or any named Saudi university could be retrieved as of 31 July 2026, and none of the 14 institutions in the Quantitative Science Studies paper replied to press enquiries [S16].

What does exist is policy. King Abdulaziz University publishes an institutional affiliation policy instructing authors that where a researcher holds multiple affiliations, “King Abdulaziz University must always be listed first to ensure unified institutional identity,” and permitting external secondary affiliations for visiting researchers, distinguished scientists, academic assignees and honorary professors [S19]. Its stated purpose includes strengthening the university’s research ranking. It is, on its face, a rule about how affiliations are written rather than about where researchers work.

The nearest thing to a Saudi academic rebuttal is the April 2025 Saudi Medical Journal editorial by Muhammad Omair Sultan Meo and Muhammad Zain Sultan Meo, which attributes the rise to investment, Vision 2030 and the growth of the system to 68 institutions, and identifies the central challenge as “not just to attract but to retain top international faculty and researchers” [S7]. It does not address the affiliation critique. The Ministry of Education has not published one.

How Do Saudi Students Perform on PISA?

Below every OECD benchmark, and the proficiency shares matter more than the means.

In PISA 2022, Saudi Arabia’s 15-year-olds scored 389 in mathematics against an OECD average of 472, 383 in reading against 476, and 390 in science against 485 [S20]. Saudi Arabia first participated in 2018; mathematics improved on 2018, reading declined and science was statistically unchanged [S2].

The proficiency distribution is where the system’s shape appears:

• Mathematics: 30% of students reached Level 2 or higher (OECD average 69%). “Almost no students” reached Level 5 or 6 (OECD average 9%) [S2].
• Reading: 37% reached Level 2 or higher (OECD 74%). Almost none reached Level 5 or higher (OECD 7%) [S2].
• Science: 38% reached Level 2 or higher (OECD 76%). Almost none were top performers (OECD 7%) [S2].

Two findings complicate the obvious reading. First, Saudi Arabia is unusually equitable in its underperformance. Advantaged students outscored disadvantaged students by 47 points in mathematics against an OECD average gap of 93, and socio-economic status explained just 6% of performance variation against 15% across the OECD. Some 14% of disadvantaged Saudi students scored in their country’s top quarter, above the OECD’s 10% [S2]. The weakness is systemic rather than concentrated in a disadvantaged tail.

Second, the gender pattern inverts the global norm at the bottom of the distribution. Boys and girls performed similarly in mathematics, but girls outscored boys in reading by 33 points, and 71% of Saudi boys fell below Level 2 in reading against 55% of girls [S2]. On the OECD’s own framing, the reading crisis in Saudi schools is disproportionately a boys’ crisis.

What TIMSS Shows That PISA Does Not

TIMSS separates fourth-graders from eighth-graders, and the separation produces the single most useful finding in the Saudi school data.

Source: IEA, TIMSS 2023 International Results in Mathematics and Science, published 4 December 2024. Scale centrepoint 500 [S21][S22].

Saudi Arabia sits below the scale centrepoint in all four cells, and below the United Arab Emirates by 58 to 92 points. In the international grade 4 mathematics table it was among the five lowest-performing systems, alongside Brazil, Morocco, Kuwait and South Africa [S23]. Regional comparison sits in the GCC education benchmark.

The trend series is where the analysis changes:

Source: IEA TIMSS 2023 trend exhibits [S22].

Primary education is improving and lower-secondary education is not. Fourth-grade mathematics rose 22 points between 2019 and 2023 and fourth-grade science 26 points — real gains, statistically significant on the IEA’s own standard errors. Over the same interval, eighth-grade mathematics moved 3 points, inside its confidence interval, and eighth-grade science fell 12 points. Neither eighth-grade subject has recovered its 2011 level; grade 8 science at 419 is 17 points below where it stood fifteen years ago.

That is what a reform succeeding at one end of the system and failing at the other looks like. It is consistent with PISA 2022, which tests 15-year-olds — the band where TIMSS shows no improvement — and recorded no significant change in the share of Saudi students below baseline proficiency since 2018 [S2].

How Much Does Saudi Arabia Spend on Education?

A large sum that has stopped growing, inside a budget that has grown enormously.

The Ministry of Finance allocated SAR202bn ($53.9bn) to the education sector in the FY2026 budget, covering 38 government entities [S24]. The historical comparison in the same document is the finding: education was SAR204bn in actual 2024 spending and an estimated SAR199bn in 2025 — a 2.3% decline [S24]. UNESCO’s 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report puts 2023 education spending at SAR189bn (about $50bn), 17% of total public expenditure, of which 42% went to higher, technical and vocational education [S25].

Set that against the aggregate. Andrew Leber of the Carnegie Endowment wrote on 7 May 2026: “Government spending is up 67 percent overall since 2015, but education spending is up by less than 3 percent over the same time period.” [S26] For a transformation whose binding constraint is human capital, a real-terms contraction in the education share is the most consequential allocation decision in the budget — and it is not one of the 390 indicators in the Vision 2030 KPI framework that reported 93% attainment for 2025. Our education spending reference carries the longer budget series.

The Human Capability Development Programme, launched in 2021, owns the delivery side of this. Its most-quoted target — five Saudi universities in the global top 200 by 2030 — is a rankings target [S10]. On the QS 2027 table, Saudi Arabia has three. On THE’s 2026 table it has one. On ARWU 2025 it has none inside 100 and one inside 150. Which ranking is used determines whether the goal looks nearly met or barely started, and no published Vision document specifies which table counts.

Is This a Labour Supply Problem or a Quality Problem?

A quality problem. The demographic-shortage story that usually accompanies Saudi skills coverage is not supported by the data.

Saudi Arabia’s national workforce is still growing and will keep growing well past 2030. A third of Saudi nationals are under 15, the citizen population expands at about 2% a year, and Saudi-national fertility is 2.7 births per woman — above replacement. The widely quoted 2.0 is the total resident figure, dragged down by an expatriate population that is 77.2% male and records a fertility rate of 0.8. The cohorts now in primary school guarantee two further decades of labour-market entry; the inflection point lands in the 2040s, not the Vision 2030 window. That arithmetic is set out in full in our Saudi fertility rate analysis and the age structure in Saudi Arabia’s youth population.

At the same time, expatriates hold roughly 78% of employment — 14.8 million of 19.03 million jobs at the end of 2025 — a share higher than when Saudisation was relaunched, as documented in expats at 78% of the Saudi workforce. Saudi unemployment fell to 6.4% in Q1 2026, beating the 7% Vision target six years early [S27].

Put those two facts together and the conclusion is forced. There is no shortage of working-age Saudis, and no mass of unemployed Saudis either. What there is, is an economy filling three-quarters of its jobs with imported labour while its school system sends 70% of 15-year-olds into the world below the OECD’s baseline mathematics standard. Whether quota policy can change that is examined in is Saudisation working; the demographic framing is in the Saudi youth bulge.

One official number captures the transmission. The Ministry of Finance records that the share of technical and vocational graduates entering work within six months of graduating rose to 56.2% in 2025 from 47.8% in 2024 [S24]. Presented as an achievement, it also says 44% of the Kingdom’s vocational graduates were not in work half a year after finishing.

Is Saudi Arabia’s Education System Improving?

In parts, and the legislative machinery arrived in July 2026.

The General Education Law was approved by royal decree and announced on 24 July 2026 [S28]. It creates a General Education Affairs Council chaired by the Minister of Education, with representatives from other ministries, the Education and Training Evaluation Commission (ETEC) and the private sector. The Council will set admission ages, approve teacher employment regulations, oversee virtual, private and foreign schools and regulate international curricula, with enforcement powers running to fines, suspension of student admissions and licence revocation. The law also authorises minimum salary requirements for private-school teachers and a standard teacher employment contract. Analysis by Pinsent Masons published 29 July 2026 puts commencement at 180 days after publication in the Official Gazette — approximately 20 January 2027 — with implementing regulations to follow [S29]. Education Minister Yousef bin Abdullah Al-Benyan called the approval “significant backing” for reform [S28]. Our guide to the statute’s 68 articles and the seven instruments they replace sets out what changes for schools, teachers and foreign operators.

Curriculum reform is further along. The National Curriculum Center introduced artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, tourism and hospitality, fashion and design and first aid as secondary electives for the 2025-26 academic year, expanded Chinese into the second intermediate grade and strengthened English in grades 5–6 [S30]. Its chief executive, Abdulrahman Al-Ruwaili, framed the shift as one in which “the curriculum is no longer confined to textbooks” [S30].

Teacher licensing has moved backwards. ETEC’s professional licence, with a general and a subject-specific examination and a minimum passing score of 50, was the system’s principal quality gate for the teaching workforce. In November 2024 the Ministry of Education removed the licence as a condition of annual bonuses and of practising, retaining it only for contract renewal and new appointments, and exempting teachers aged 50 or over as of 1 February 2026 [S31]. Whatever the merits — the ministry cited veteran teachers’ experience and a shift toward professional development — the effect is that the quality instrument aimed directly at the eighth-grade classroom was loosened in the same period the eighth-grade scores stalled.

Higher education has expanded fast. Some 46% of Saudis aged 25–34 had completed tertiary education by 2025, the tertiary gross enrolment ratio reached 78%, and the higher-education gender gap narrowed from 20 percentage points in 2006 to five by 2022 [S25]. The system now runs to 68 institutions [S7]; the sector overview sits at our Saudi education sector hub, and the international schools segment is where the new law’s private-provider provisions will bite first.

Why This Matters for Vision 2030

Rankings and learning outcomes are being asked to do different jobs, and only one of them is load-bearing.

University rankings are an investment-attraction and prestige instrument. They tell a multinational deciding where to place a regional headquarters that the talent pipeline is credible. On that job the strategy has partly worked: a top-100 QS placement is a real asset, and KFUPM’s employment statistics suggest it is producing employable engineers rather than citation counts alone — though the share of those engineering degrees going to women is the lowest in the Gulf.

School outcomes are a production-function input. They determine, twelve to twenty years later, what the labour force can do. PISA and TIMSS scores in 2022 and 2023 describe the cohort entering the Saudi workforce between 2028 and 2034 — precisely the period in which Vision 2030’s non-oil economy is meant to be self-sustaining.

The macro backdrop sharpens the point. GASTAT’s Q2 2026 flash estimate, published 30 July 2026, put real GDP at −4.8% year on year with non-oil growth at just +0.6%, down from 2.9% in Q1 and 4.9% for 2025 [S32]. The deceleration is substantially war-driven, but it removes the fiscal headroom that would fund a step change in school spending, and it arrives while education’s budget share is already contracting. The quarterly series is tracked at non-oil GDP growth.

This piece is deliberately narrower than our general assessment of Saudi education quality and the skills gap, which covers the system’s inputs, institutions and workforce readiness as a whole. Treated here is one question: whether the ranking series and the outcome series can both be true, and what follows if they are.

Risks, Contradictions and Open Questions

No causal claim is available on the ranking gains. The literature documents patterns, the responses of Clarivate and ShanghaiRanking, and a collapse in Saudi HCR counts. It does not decompose any specific university’s rise into genuine capacity and indicator management, and its authors decline to.

The KAU indicator profile is a single data point. A HiCi score of 0.0 in ARWU 2025 is a fact from the ranking body’s own page. Whether it reflects a corrected count or a corrected methodology applied to a stable population cannot be determined from published data.

No PISA reading exists after 2022. Results from PISA 2025 are not due until December 2026, and every PISA figure here describes students schooled through the pandemic.

The eighth-grade stall has no published explanation. No Saudi source — ETEC, the Ministry of Education or the National Curriculum Center — has accounted for fourth-grade gains of 22 and 26 points coinciding with an eighth-grade science decline of 12. It may be a cohort effect, an assessment effect or a real secondary-schooling problem.

Saudi Arabia’s ranking target has no specified table. “Five universities in the top 200 by 2030” produces three different answers depending on whether QS, THE or ARWU is used. Until a Vision delivery document names the source, the indicator is not verifiable.

The 14- and 18-university studies overlap but are not identical. King Saud, King Khalid, Prince Sattam, Princess Nourah and Taif appear in both; Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud only in the first, and Najran, Umm Al-Qura, Ha’il and Tabuk only in the second. Different thresholds produce different lists — itself a caution against treating either as a definitive register.

The spending figures are not inflation-adjusted. Leber’s “less than 3 percent” and the Ministry of Finance’s SAR204bn-to-SAR199bn series are both nominal. In real per-pupil terms the decline is larger than either states, but no published deflated series exists.

What to Watch Next

• PISA 2025 results, December 2026. Saudi Arabia’s third cycle, and the first read on whether the fourth-grade TIMSS gains have reached 15-year-olds.
• Publication of the General Education Law in the Official Gazette. Commencement runs 180 days from that date, currently estimated near 20 January 2027 [S29]. The implementing regulations will show whether ETEC gains enforcement power or stays advisory.
• The FY2027 budget statement, expected December 2026. Whether the education allocation breaks above SAR204bn in nominal terms after three flat-to-falling years.
• Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers 2026, expected November 2026. Whether the Saudi national count recovers from 27 or consolidates further into KAUST.
• QS World University Rankings 2028, expected June 2027. Whether King Abdulaziz University’s QS position follows its ARWU position down — which would mean both systems are now measuring the same corrected population.
• TIMSS 2027 administration. The test of whether the grade 4 improvement carries into grade 8 with the same cohort.

Related Vision 2030 Context

• Saudi education quality and the skills gap — the system-wide assessment.
• Education spending in Saudi Arabia — budget allocation by level.
• Human Capability Development Programme — the programme that owns education reform.
• Saudi education sector — universities, TVET, scholarships and private provision.
• GCC education benchmark — how the Gulf systems compare.
• Expats are 78% of Saudi Arabia’s employed workforce — the labour-market consequence.
• Saudi Arabia’s fertility rate — why there is no workforce shortage before the 2040s.
• Unemployment in Saudi Arabia — the headline the school data sits behind.

Sources

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