The 100 Best Universities in the World Today

Some university rankings focus on factors unrelated to academic merit. Thus, some rankings of colleges and universities may give weight to attractiveness of campus, satisfaction of students and alumni, extracurricular benefits (such as top athletics programs), affordability of tuition, and expected income of graduates.

This is not such a ranking.

In contrast, if you are looking for a ranking with a focus on academic prestige, scholarly excellence, and sheer intellectual horsepower, then this is the ranking you want.

At the universities in this ranking, you will be mixing with the brightest faculty and students in the world, and developing your knowledge and skills so that you yourself will be in a position to join the world’s elite academics, scientists, and thinkers.

Ranking Methodology

To counteract the apparent gaming of university rankings, TheBestSchools.org contracted with InfluenceRankings.com to form a ranking based on statistical document analysis across the Web. For the present ranking, this meant selecting a representative sample of disciplines at universities (not just natural and social sciences, as with Shanghai, but also humanities and professional schools), finding the influencers in each discipline, and then pooling these influencers to see where they are on faculty and where they got their degrees. Details about the underlying methodology can be found here.

The result is a ranking immune to gaming because it is based entirely on the “footprint” of key researchers and scholars on the Web — -not just in terms of some broad popularity measure (such as number of Google search results), but by measuring their strength of association on the Web with the topics in which they are supposed to be expert.

Accordingly, the result is a ranking that focuses on the preeminent factor that ought to be used to gauge academic merit in the first place — namely, the combined influence of a school’s faculty across fields of study. Yes, this ranking is entirely Web-based. But in this day and age, if you’re alive and currently active but not influential on the Web, then you’re not influential, period!

A cursory examination of our new ranking shows that we are on to something. All the schools in the ranking clearly deserve a place here, as evidenced by their national reputations, as well as by their appearance in other existing rankings (note that are not dismissing other rankings, but merely note their acknowledged vulnerability to gaming). So our new ranking, minimally, passes a sanity check.

But our ranking also offers some genuinely new insights. All the usual suspects are there, to be sure, but their order may seem counter-intuitive. Harvard, as always, is at the top. But the University of Chicago sits at number 3 (often it is ranked around number 10). However, the University of Chicago is not just a great school for the natural sciences, which tend to get pride of place with Shanghai, it is particularly strong in economics (with a slew of Nobel laureates in that field), as well as in professional schools (such as law and medicine), and in the humanities. By contrast, Caltech, which is extremely strong in the natural sciences, is weaker in other disciplines, and thus drops from its usual perch among the top 15 down to number 38.

A lot of interesting patterns emerge as one examines this ranking. Fifty-five of the schools listed are in the United States (52 were in the US in the previous version of this ranking). Of those outside the US, 15 are in the UK, eight in Germany, three in Canada, three in Australia, three in the Netherlands, and one each in 13 additional countries.

1. Harvard University	26. Hebrew University of Jerusalem	51. University of Birmingham	76. Imperial College London
2. University of California - Berkeley	27. University of Washington	52. Boston University	77. University of Göttingen
3. University of Chicago	28. The University of Texas at Austin	53. University of Tübingen	78. University of California–Davis
4. University of Michigan	29. University of British Columbia	54. University of Sussex	79. Dartmouth College
5. Columbia University	30. King's College London	55. University of Warwick	80. University of Sydney
6. Yale University	31. University of Bristol	56. University of Sheffield	81. National Autonomous University of Mexico
7. Princeton University	32. Rutgers University	57. University of Arizona	82. University of Buenos Aires
8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	33. London School of Economics	58. University of Virginia	83. Goethe University Frankfurt
9. University of Cambridge	34. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	59. University of Leeds	84. Ohio State University
10. Stanford University	35. University of Southern California	60. University of Rochester	85. University of Copenhagen
11. Oxford University	36. University of Edinburgh	61. University of Amsterdam	86. Arizona State University
12. Cornell University	37. Brown University	62. Heidelberg University	87. University of Southampton
13. University of California–Los Angeles	38. California Institute of Technology	63. Syracuse University	88. Florida State University
14. University of Wisconsin–Madison	39. University of Munich	64. University of Massachusetts–Amherst	89. University of Calcutta
15. University of Toronto	40. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	65. University of Utah	90. University of Georgia
16. University of Manchester	41. Moscow State University	66. Washington University in St Louis	91. The University of Tokyo
17. Duke University	42. University College London	67. Leiden University	92. University of Melbourne
18. New York University	43. University of Vienna	68. Free University of Berlin	93. University of Florida
19. Johns Hopkins University	44. University of Maryland	69. University of Notre Dame	94. Brandeis University
20. University of Pennsylvania	45. University of Pittsburgh	70. Rice University	95. Stockholm University
21. University of Minnesota Twin Cities	46. Pennsylvania State University	71. University of Oslo	96. Vanderbilt University
22. University of California - San Diego	47. University of California–Irvine	72. Birkbeck, University of London	97. Case Western Reserve University
23. University of Paris (Sorbonne)	48. Australian National University	73. Utrecht University	98. University of Warsaw
24. Northwestern University	49. Swarthmore College	74. Wesleyan University	99. University of Cologne
25. McGill University	50. University of Bonn	75. City University of New York	100. Michigan State University