MIT Claims Top Spot For 11th Year In A Row In The QS Rankings Of The World’s Best Universities

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) continues to be rated the world’s best university, according to the just-released QS Quacquarelli Symonds’ QS World University Rankings, featuring 1418 institutions across 100 locations. It’s the 11th year in a row that MIT has claimed the top spot in these rankings.

While MIT continues its hold on first place and U.S. universities comprise almost half (9) of the institutions in the top 20, other indications point to a slide overall in the standing of American universities this year. For example, of 201 ranked U.S. universities, over half (103) saw their ranking decline, 44 stayed the same, while only 29 saw their ranking rise. Overall, 25 U.S. universities were newly ranked this year.

Ben Sowter, QS Senior Vice President, said: “MIT’s success takes the spotlight as the world’s preeminent university and the US shines as the world’s superlative higher education system. However, the American higher education system is declining across all QS metrics. This year, there is not a single indicator in which more than half of US ranked universities improve—illustrating that US world hegemony in higher education is waning, because of encroaching excellence from abroad.”

Here are the top 20 world universities according to QS:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

University of Cambridge

Stanford University

University of Oxford

Harvard University

California Institute of Technology

Imperial College London

University College London (UCL)

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich)

University of Chicago

National University of Singapore

Peking University

University of Pennsylvania

Tsinghua University

University of Edinburgh

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Princeton University

Yale University

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Cornell University

Eight other U.S. universities cracked the top 50 - Columbia University (22), Johns Hopkins University (24), University of Michigan (25), University of California - Berkeley (27), Northwestern University (32), New York University (39), University of California - Los Angeles (44), and Duke University (50).

This is the 19th edition of the rankings by QS, the London-based company that specializes in analysis of global higher education and rankings of different types of academic programs. According to the company, its ranking website was viewed 147 million times in 2021.

The six weighted indicators that QS uses to rank world universities are as follows:

1. Academic reputation (40%), based on a survey of higher education experts.
2. Employer reputation (10%), a survey of how well institutions prepare students for successful careers.
3. Faculty/student ratio (20%), the number of students divided by the number of faculty.
4. Citations per faculty (20%), a measure of university research quality based on the total number of academic citations to papers produced by a university in a five-year period.
5. International student ratio (5%), the proportion of non-domestic students at the institution.
6. International faculty ratio (5%), the proportion of non-domestic faculty at the institution.

That methodology yielded some impressive performance results, including 16.4 million academic papers published between 2016 and 2020, 117.8 million citations to those papers, and the expert opinions of over 151,000 academic faculty and over 99,000 employers.

Looking at how U.S. institutions performed on the various indicators, QS offered the following summaries:

• U.S. universities continue to be the world’s research leaders, serving as the home to eight of the world’s top-10 institutions for Citations per Faculty.
• U.S. universities enjoy an outstanding reputation, based on the expert opinion of academic peers. Seven American institutions are in the top 10 on this measure, but only seven of the ranked U.S. universities improved on this indicator compared to last year.
• A similar pattern is seen for QS’ Employer Reputation measure, based on the opinion of global employers and hiring managers. While six U.S. institutions place in the world’s top-10 for this metric, only 13 U.S. universities improved compared to last year.
• In terms of the International Faculty Ratio, only three US universities rank in the world’s top-100. However, 42 universities moved up on this indicator.
• Seven U.S. universities rank in the top-100 for International Students but only 15 U.S. schools improved year-over-year.
• Overall, the U.S. enjoys a high Faculty per Student indicator as a measure of teaching capacity, but there was still a broad decline on this dimension, with more than half its universities slipping lower on this indicator.