U.S. News & World Report Best Global University Ranking

The Best Global Universities ranking by U.S. News & World Report is an annual ranking of world universities. On October 28, 2014, U.S. News, which began ranking American universities in 1983, published its inaugural global ranking, assessing 500 universities in 49 countries. That first installment of the Best Global University Ranking was published without prior announcement, with U.S. News later clarifying that the rankings of that year were a trial balloon for the publication's entrance into the global university rankings field. After pre-announcing the rankings of next year, in 2016, the periodical formalized the global university rankings as part of its regular annual programming. Having made official the ranking methodology, it disclosed that it is based on 10 different indicators that measure universities' academic performance and reputations.^[1] The ranking has since been revised and expanded to cover 1,500 institutions in 81 countries and now includes five regional and 28 subject rankings.^[2] Employing 13 indicators and based largely on data provided by Clarivate, the U.S. News global ranking is methodologically different from its ranking of American institutions; global universities are rated using factors such as research reputation, academic publications, and the number of highly cited papers.^[3][4]

Inside Higher Ed noted in 2014 that U.S. News is entering into the international college and university rankings area that is already "dominated by three major global university rankings": the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, and the QS World University Rankings.^[5] U.S. News's chief data strategist Robert Morse stated "We're well-known in the field for doing academic rankings so we thought it was a natural extension of the other rankings that we're doing."^[5] Morse pointed out that U.S. News is "the first American publisher to enter the global rankings space", given Times Higher Education and QS are both British, while the Academic Ranking of World Universities is Chinese.^[5]

The Washington Post noted that some U.S. institutions rank lower on U.S. News's global ranking than on their domestic ranking, in particular Princeton, which was named top university in the U.S. in the 2015 domestic ranking but was ranked behind nine other U.S. universities (and three U.K. universities) in the 2015 global ranking. This was attributed to the global ranking concentrating on "research prowess", while the "undergraduate experience", for which uniform international data is hard to obtain, was not included.^[6] Forbes, which, along with many others, has roundly criticized the U.S. News ranking of American colleges,^[7] praised the U.S. News global ranking as being mostly based upon “objective measures” and representing a “worthy” evaluation scheme.^[8]

Results[]

US News Best Global Universities—Top 10 (2015-2022)

Institution	2022[9]	2021[10]	2020[11]	2019[12]	2018[13]	2017[14]	2016[15]	2015[16]
Harvard University	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2
Stanford University	3	3	3	3	3	3	4	4
University of California, Berkeley	4	4	4	4	4	4	3	3
University of Oxford	5	5	5	5	5	6	5	5
Columbia University	6	6	7	8	8	9	9	10
University of Washington-Seattle	7	8	10	10	10	-	-	-
University of Cambridge	8	9	9	7	7	7	6	6
California Institute of Technology	9	7	6	6	6	5	7	7
Johns Hopkins University	9	10	11	12	10	-	-	-

Note: Princeton University was ranked 8th in 2017 and 2020 and 9th in 2018 and 2019. Yale University tied with Johns Hopkins University and University of Washington for 10th in 2018.

American and British universities have occupied the top ten spots since the inaugural publication. Harvard and MIT have consistently topped the list, while two British institutions, Oxford and Cambridge, and four other U.S. universities – Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, and Caltech – have been ranked among the ten best since 2015.

US News Best Global Universities—Top 50 (2018-2022)

Institution	2022[9]	2021[10]	2020[11]	2019[12]	2018[13]
Harvard University	1	1	1	1	1
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	2	2	2	2	2
Stanford University	3	3	3	3	3
University of California, Berkeley	4	4	4	4	4
University of Oxford	5	5	5	5	5
Columbia University	6	6	7	8	8
University of Washington-Seattle	7	8	10	10	10
University of Cambridge	8	9	9	7	7
California Institute of Technology	9	7	6	6	6
Johns Hopkins University	9	10	11	12	10
University of California, San Francisco	11	15	15	15	15
Yale University	12	11	12	11	10
University of Pennsylvania	13	14	16	16	19
University of California, Los Angeles	14	13	14	13	13
University of Chicago	15	15	13	14	14
Princeton University	16	11	8	9	9
University College London	16	19	21	21	22
University of Toronto	16	17	18	20	20
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor	19	17	17	18	17
Imperial College London	20	20	20	18	17
University of California, San Diego	21	21	19	17	16
Cornell University	22	22	23	23	23
Duke University	23	23	22	22	21
Northwestern University	24	24	24	24	24
University of Melbourne	25	25	26	26	26
Tsinghua University	26	28	36	50	64
ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)	26	26	25	25	25
University of Sydney	28	27	27	31	34
National University of Singapore	29	32	34	38	43
New York University	30	29	28	28	28
Washington University in St. Louis	31	33	31	32	32
The University of Edinburgh	32	30	28	27	30
King's College London	33	34	37	39	41
Nanyang Technological University	33	38	43	49	55
University of British Columbia	35	31	30	29	27
University of Queensland	36	36	42	42	45
University of Copenhagen	37	34	32	34	37
University of Amsterdam	38	40	40	51	55
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill	39	36	33	32	34
Monash University	40	48	59	62	68
University of New South Wales	41	51	64	70	69
University of Pittsburgh	42	43	47	43	48
University of Texas at Austin	43	38	34	36	32
King Abdulaziz University	44	42	51	76	110
Peking University	45	51	59	68	65
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich	46	46	43	46	40
Sorbonne University	46	43	37	-	38
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven	48	48	56	57	63
Karolinska Institute	48	48	51	51	52
Utrecht University	48	54	55	56	57

See also[]

• U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges Ranking

References[]