The Top 100 Global Universities

Aug. 13, 2006 - In response to the same forces that have propelled the world economy toward global integration, universities have also become more self-consciously global: seeking students from around the world who represent the entire spec­ trum of cultures and values, sending their own students abroad to prepare them for global careers, offering courses of study that address the challenges of an inter­ connected world and collaborative research programs to advance science for the benefit of all humanity.

To capture these developments, NEWSWEEK devised a ranking of global universities that takes into account openness and diversity, as well as distinction in research. We evaluated schools on some of the measures used in well-known rankings published by Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Times of London Higher Education Survey. Fifty percent of the score came from equal parts of three measures used by Shanghai Jiatong: the number of highly-cited researchers in various academic fields, the number of articles published in Nature and Science, and the number of articles listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities indices.

Another 40 percent of the score came from equal parts of four measures used by the Times: the percentage of international faculty, the percentage of international students, citations per faculty member (using ISI data), and the ratio of faculty to students. The final 10 percent came from library holdings (number of volumes).

Here is our ranking:

1. Harvard University

2. Stanford University

3. Yale University

4. California Institute of Technology

5. University of California at Berkeley

6. University of Cambridge

7. Massachusetts Institute Technology

8. Oxford University

9. University of California at San Francisco

10. Columbia University

11. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

12. University of California at Los Angeles

13. University of Pennsylvania

14. Duke University

15. Princeton Universitty

16. Tokyo University

17. Imperial College London

18. University of Toronto

19. Cornell University

20. University of Chicago

21. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich

22. University of Washington at Seattle

23. University of California at San Diego

24. Johns Hopkins University

25. University College London

26. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne

27. University Texas at Austin

28. University of Wisconsin at Madison

29. Kyoto University

30. University of Minnesota Twin Cities

31. University of British Columbia

32. University of Geneva

33. Washington University in St. Louis

34. London School of Economics

35. Northwestern University

36. National University of Singapore

37. University of Pittsburgh

38. Australian National University

39. New York University

40. Pennsylvania State University

41. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

42. McGill University

43. Ecole Polytechnique

44. University of Basel

45. University of Maryland

46. University of Zurich

47. University of Edinburgh

48. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

49. University of Bristol

50. University of Sydney

51. University of Colorado at Boulder

52. Utrecht University

53. University of Melbourne

54. University of Southern California

55. University of Alberta

56. Brown University

57. Osaka University

58. University of Manchester

59. University of California at Santa Barbara

60. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

61. Wageningen University

62. Michigan State University

63. University of Munich

64. University of New South Wales

65. Boston University

66. Vanderbilt University

67. University of Rochester

68. Tohoku University

69. University of Hong Kong

70. University of Sheffield

71. Nanyang Technological University

72. University of Vienna

73. Monash University

74. University of Nottingham

75. Carnegie Mellon University

76. Lund University

77. Texas A&M University

78. University of Western Australia

79. Ecole Normale Super Paris

80. University of Virginia

81. Technical University of Munich

82. Hebrew University of Jerusalem

83. Leiden University

84. University of Waterloo

85. King's College London

86. Purdue University

87. University of Birmingham

88. Uppsala University

89. University of Amsterdam

90. University of Heidelberg

91. University of Queensland

92. University of Leuven

93. Emory University

94. Nagoya University

95. Case Western Reserve University

96. Chinese University of Hong Kong

97. University of Newcastle

98. Innsbruck University

99. University of Massachusetts at Amherst

100. Sussex University