22 of the World's Top 50 Universities Are in the U.S.
Want to obtain your degree from a prestigious university, but aren't sure where to go?
This graphic provides a birds-eye view of where the world's 50 best universities are located. Ranks were gathered from Times Higher Education's 2024 ranking, which assessed 1,904 universities across five major areas: teaching, research environment, research quality, industry, and international outlook.
As we can see, nearly half of the top 50 universities are located in the U.S., with the rest sprinkled throughout Europe and Asia. See the "Dataset" tab in this post for the full list.
Dataset
| Rank | University | Country |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | University of Oxford | UK |
| 2 | Stanford University | US |
| 3 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | US |
| 4 | Harvard University | US |
| 5 | University of Cambridge | UK |
| 6 | Princeton University | US |
| 7 | California Institute of Technology | US |
| 8 | Imperial College London | UK |
| 9 | University of California, Berkeley | US |
| 10 | Yale University | US |
| 11 | ETH Zurich | Switzerland |
| 12 | Tsinghua University | China |
| 13 | The University of Chicago | US |
| 14 | Peking University | China |
| 15 | Johns Hopkins University | US |
| 16 | University of Pennsylvania | US |
| 17 | Columbia University | US |
| 18 | University of California, Los Angeles | US |
| 19 | National University of Singapore | Singapore |
| 20 | Cornell University | US |
| 21 | University of Toronto | Canada |
| 22 | UCL | UK |
| 23 | University of Michigan-Ann Arbor | US |
| 24 | Carnegie Mellon University | US |
| 25 | University of Washington | US |
| 26 | Duke University | US |
| 27 | New York University | US |
| 28 | Northwestern University | US |
| 29 | The University of Tokyo | Japan |
| 30 | University of Edinburgh | UK |
| 31 | Technical University of Munich | Germany |
| 32 | Nanyang Technological University | Singapore |
| 33 | �cole Polytechnique F�d�rale de Lausanne | Switzerland |
| 34 | University of California, San Diego | US |
| 35 | University of Hong Kong | Hong Kong |
| 36 | Georgia Institute of Technology | US |
| 37 | University of Melbourne | Australia |
| 38 | King's College London | UK |
| 39 | LMU Munich | Germany |
| 40 | Paris Sciences et Lettres | France |
| 41 | University of British Columbia | Canada |
| 42 | University of Illinois | US |
| 43 | Shanghai Jiao Tong University | China |
| 44 | Fudan University | China |
| 45 | KU Leuven | Belgium |
| 46 | London School of Economics and Political Science | UK |
| 47 | Universität Heidelberg | Germany |
| 48 | Delft University of Technology | Netherlands |
| 49 | McGill University | Canada |
| 50 | Karolinska Institute | Sweden |
Data sources
Ranking is based on Times Higher Education’s WUR 3.0 methodology, which includes 18 performance indicators across five areas: teaching, research environment, research quality, industry, and international outlook.
