Jahangirnagar University

Jahangirnagar University, known by the short name JU or JU Savar, is a public university in Savar, about 32 kilometres from central Dhaka. It was founded in 1970 and is a fully residential institution on a campus of roughly 697 acres.

Rankings

• Ulkaa Edu Rank 2027: position 7 overall and 7 among public universities, and 3 in the Dhaka division table. The position reflects Ulkaa's admission competitiveness assessment. Subject tables place JU 6 in business, 7 in computer science and engineering, and 7 in engineering.
• THE World University Rankings 2027: band 801-1000. The same band appears in the 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions.
• THE Asia University Rankings 2026: band 401-500.
• QS World University Rankings 2027: band 1401+ (the 2026 edition showed 1201-1400).
• QS Asia University Rankings 2026: 304 (292 in the 2025 edition).
• Webometrics 2024: 1945.

In the 2027 THE table JU is the first Bangladeshi university listed. Rankings measure different things, so each figure above should be read within its own table.

The university was set up on 20 August 1970 as Jahangirnagar Muslim University under a Pakistan-era ordinance, and teaching formally began in January 1971. After independence, the Jahangirnagar University Act of 1973 gave it its present name and dropped the word Muslim.

The name Jahangirnagar goes back to a former name of Dhaka. Islam Khan, the Mughal governor, used it in 1610 to honour the emperor Jahangir.

Since then the university has grown from a small set of departments into one with 36 departments, six faculties and four specialised institutes. In short, the university is formerly Jahangirnagar Muslim University.

Admission to the first-year programmes is through a highly competitive admission test. Check the official JU website for the circular, eligibility rules, test dates and the list of subject groups each year.

The published figures show the scale of competition. In 2025 JU had 1,842 seats and 219,399 applicants, or 119.1 applicants per seat. In 2024 there were 1,814 seats and 262,450 applicants, which is 144.7 per seat. New admissions in 2023 totalled 2,035.

Tuition and other fee amounts are not given here. Always confirm them against the current official notice.

The fall in applicants between 2024 and 2025 did not make the test easy. With more than 119 applicants for each seat, only a small fraction of candidates get a place.

The 36 departments sit under six faculties:

• Mathematical and Physical Sciences
• Social Sciences
• Arts and Humanities
• Biological Sciences
• Business Studies
• Law

The Ulkaa catalogue lists 20 programmes for the 2027 edition. They include accounting and information systems, finance and banking, management studies, marketing, computer science and engineering, statistics and data science, economics, English, law and justice, mathematics, microbiology, physics, pharmacy, archaeology, Bangla, drama and dramatics, history, international relations and philosophy.

The pharmacy programme carried accreditation from the Pharmacy Council of Bangladesh in 2026. The four institutes, which include business administration and information technology, offer additional professional courses and postgraduate degrees.

OpenAlex data show 6,851 works for the five years to 2025, with 63,283 citations, or about 9.2 per work. The OpenAlex h-index was 205 in 2026, and about 40 percent of works in 2025 had an international co-author.

By subject, 757 works fall in medicine, 537 in computer science, 390 in business and 350 in engineering in the 2025 data. Wikipedia reports 722 Scopus-indexed publications in 2022, with strong activity in physics, computer science, medicine and engineering.

The mean citedness over two years was 2.78 in 2026.

The five-year publication count has climbed each year, from 4,010 works in the period to 2021 to 4,915, 5,709 and 6,498 in the following years, before reaching 6,851 in 2025.

JU is famous for its green, lake-filled campus. Water bodies spread across the grounds attract winter birds in large numbers each year, and the campus is recorded as a habitat for about 195 bird species, 126 of them resident and 69 migratory.

The university is fully residential, with 21 halls, 11 for male students and 10 for female students. Each hall has its own administration, dining and recreation facilities, so day-to-day student life is organised around the halls.

UGC data for 2023 record 14,621 students and 827 teachers, 382 of whom held a PhD. That is about 18 students for each teacher.

Enrolment has stayed in a narrow range: 15,088 students in 2021, 15,610 in 2022 and 14,621 in 2023. Teacher numbers rose from 764 in 2021 to 827 in 2023, and the share with a PhD went from 347 teachers to 382 over the same years.