← EDU NEWS
Edu News

US universities continue to reign in world rankings

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The United States continues to reign at world university rankings. This time, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Caltech are among the best in the world according to the QS World University Rankings 2020.

US universities continue to reign in world rankings
MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Caltech are among the best universities in the world according to the QS World University Rankings 2020. Photo: MIT Dome by Ali Almossawi
June 21, 2019 By Karina Fuerte
Reading time 2 minutes
Reading Time: 2 minutes

For the eighth consecutive year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has won the first place in the QS World University Rankings 2020. The results of this annual ranking were released on June 19th, with no surprises in the Top 5 of the table where the United States continues to reign. Stanford University and Harvard positioned in the second and third places, respectively, followed by the University of Oxford and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) on the fourth and fifth position.

The study, prepared by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) a British company specialized in education, provides annually updated listings of the top universities in the world where higher education institutions are evaluated according to a methodology based on six performance metrics:

  1. Academic Reputation (40%)

  2. Employer Reputation (10%)

  3. Faculty/Student Ratio (20%)

  4. Citations per faculty (20%)

  5. International Faculty Ratio (5%)

  6. International Student Ratio (5%)

MIT stands out in the ranking criteria by obtaining an overall score of 100 of the performance metrics. Founded in 1861, MIT has about 1000 faculty members and more than 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students that work and study under the “Mind and Hand” motto that follows the institution’s mission to advance knowledge to “make the world a better place.”


Top 10 QS World University Rankings 2020

  1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

  2. Stanford University

  3. Harvard University

  4. University of Oxford

  5. California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

  6. ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology

  7. University of Cambridge

  8. UCL – University College London

  9. Imperial College London

  10. University of Chicago

European and Asian universities in the ranking

Although the US takes up practically all top ten positions in the table, British universities are the second power of this classification with the University of Oxford as the number one in Europe, followed by ETH Zurich (the only non-British of the Top 10), Cambridge, UCL, and Imperial College London.

As of Asia, Singapore leads the table with the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) tied in the 11th place of the ranking. Following is Tsinghua University (16th place) and Peking University, from China, and the University of Tokyo (Japan) tied in the 22nd position.


Latin America keeps climbing positions in world rankings

From Latin America, the University of Buenos Aires is the best positioned, ranking 74, followed by UNAM from Mexico in 103, the University of Sao Paulo in 116, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 127 and Tecnológico de Monterrey in number 158.

Top 5 QS World University Rankings 2020 – Latin America

  1. Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)

  2. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

  3. Universidade de São Paulo (USP)

  4. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC)

  5. Tecnológico de Monterrey

Click here for more details about the QS World University Rankings 2020.

Karina Fuerte

(She/her). Editor in Chief at the Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education.

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0