What are the oldest universities in the world?
The oldest universities in the world are almost always also the most prestigious. And you can see this very clearly if you go through the ranking of the oldest universities on the planet. But before we look at what it is, a necessary assumption must be made: not everyone, and not always in history, agrees on what a university is.
Universities, especially in the Far East, but also in the Middle East, China, and various parts of the world, were in ancient times something different from what we consider them to be today. They were, for example, centers of higher education than theological studies or academies of arts and sciences, in which some – highly selected – experts took specific courses on various subjects, alchemy, or perhaps what we would call strategic studies today.
For these reasons, the idea of ​​”university”, even before the word existed, can be ambiguous. And therefore it is also a question of which were the first universities in the world.
But – once this assumption has been made – we can take note of the definition of “university” which is generally considered to be the most accredited and used today.
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10 oldest universities in the world
The first university in the world was founded in Italy, in the city of our country most famous for higher and professional studies: Bologna. We are talking about almost a thousand years, in fact it was 1088. While most universities in the world were founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seven centuries later. Here are the ten oldest universities in the world.
