The World's Top 100 Universities

Want to study at one of the world's top 100 universities? The QS World University Rankings® offers an annually updated list of not only the top 100 universities in the world, but in fact more than 900.

In the 2016-2017 edition of the QS World University Rankings, half of the top 100 universities in the world are located in the US (which has 32 representatives) or the UK (18). Next is Australia, with six institutions listed among the world’s top 100 universities, followed by Japan with five. There are four entries each for Canada, Germany, China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Switzerland, while Sweden has three.

Other countries featured among the top 100 universities in the world include France, the Netherlands and Singapore (with two entries each), as well as Argentina, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Taiwan (one entry each).

The world’s top 50 universities this year:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2. Stanford University
3. Harvard University
4. University of Cambridge
5. California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
6. University of Oxford
7. UCL (University College London)
8. ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
9. Imperial College London
10. University of Chicago
11. Princeton University
12. National University of Singapore (NUS)
13. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU)
14. Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
15. Yale University
16. Cornell University
17. Johns Hopkins University
18. University of Pennsylvania
19. University of Edinburgh
20. Columbia University
21. King’s College London
22. Australian National University
23. University of Michigan
24. Tsinghua University
25. Duke University
26. Northwestern University
27. University of Hong Kong
28. University of Berkeley, California
29. University of Manchester
30. McGill University
31. University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
32. University of Toronto
33. Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS Paris) 
34. University of Tokyo
35. Seoul National University
36. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
37. Kyoto University
38. London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
39. Peking University
40. University of California, San Diego
41. University of Bristol
42. University of Melbourne
43. Fudan University
44. Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)
45. University of British Columbia
46. University of Sydney
47. New York University (NYU)
48. KAIST – Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
49. University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Brown University (joint 49th)

For the full top 100 universities in the world (and more!), click here.

This article was originally published in June 2013. It was updated in September 2016.