Top Universities for Psychology 2020

The recently released QS World University Rankings by Subject 2020 features 301 of the top higher education institutions to study psychology.

The QS University Rankings by Subject are based on four indicators: academic reputation, employer reputation, research citations per paper and the H-index (a way of measuring the productivity and published work of a scientist or scholar). You can find more details about the methodology behind the subject rankings here.

Read on to learn more about the best psychology schools in each region. Alternatively, if you would like to explore the 301 schools in further detail, click here to view the full table.

Over a third of the ranked universities for psychology are in the US and Canada, with 91 US institutions and 17 Canadian. The US also accounts for seven of the schools in the global top 10 for psychology. Harvard University continues its five-year run at the top of the table.

There are a further 16 US institutions in the global top 50, notably New York University (NYU, 11^th place); Columbia University (12^th); the University of Pennsylvania (14^th); the University of Chicago (16^th) and Princeton University (joint 17^th).

Canada’s highest ranked university for psychology is the University of British Columbia in 13^th place globally. Two other Canadian institutions are in the global top 50: The University of Toronto in 19^th and McGill University in 30^th.

A total of 131 European programs feature in the psychology rankings, with 13 schools making it into the global top 50. The highest ranked European psychology program can be found at The University of Cambridge in 3^rd place, narrowly beating arch-rivals The University of Oxford in 4^th.

Continental Europe’s best Psychology program can be found at the University of Amsterdam; it has risen from 16th to 15th and is the only non-Anglosphere program to feature among the top 20. Other notable European psychology programs can be found at King's College London (KCL, 20^th), the University of Edinburgh (24^th), Belgium’s Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (25^th) and London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE, 29^th), among others.