US News Rankings: The top 10 universities in each global region

02 Nov 2018

The US News & World Report’s fifth annual Best Global University Rankings was released earlier this week.

More than 1,200 universities in 75 countries were evaluated in a bid to offer insight into how universities compare with each other on the global stage. The rankings began with a pool of 1,372 universities, extracted from Clarivate Analytics’ global reputation survey. US News then added 1,368 institutions that had met the minimum threshold of 1,500 papers published between 2012 and 2016.

After removing duplicates, each institution was ranked using 13 indicators to measure global research performance, which includes global research reputation; regional research reputation; and the number of publications that stand among the 10 percent most cited. The full list of indicators can be found here.

From this, we can see the rankings focus specifically on schools’ academic research and reputation overall, rather than their separate undergraduate or graduate provisions.

Out of 1,250 schools across 75 countries, these universities pave the way for change across the globe.

These are the #BestGlobal Universities. https://t.co/8Z9FYAjZop pic.twitter.com/cBQpQZ4jYJ

— U.S. News (@usnews) October 30, 2018

It’s a handy guide for prospective international students to benchmark how schools in their own country and region perform against those across the world. This year’s ranking, for example, shows that Asia’s top five universities achieved scores that are comparable to the top five universities in Australia and New Zealand. Such perspective gives the prospective student more information to calculate the cost-benefit of any planned academic endeavours overseas.

These are the top 10 universities in each global region, according to the rankings:

Africa

University	Global Score
University of Cape Town	66.6
University of Witwatersrand	59.9
University of KwaZulu Natal	53.3
Stellenbosch University	53.1
University of Johannesburg	50.5
University of Pretoria	48.9
Cairo University	48.2
Makerere University	46.5
Mansoura University	39.4
North West University – South Africa	59

Asia

University	Global Score
National University of Singapore	75.2
Nanyang Technological University	73.8
Tsinghua University	73.4
University of Tokyo	72.2
Peking University	72
King Abdulaziz University	70.8
University of Hong Kong	67.7
Weizmann Institute of Science	66.8
Kyoto University	65.6
Seoul National University	65.1

Australia/New Zealand

University	Global Score
University of Melbourne	77.5
University of Sydney	76.6
University of Queensland	74.4
Monash University	72.2
Australian National University	72.1
University of New South Wales	71.7
University of Western Australia	69.7
University of Adelaide	67.9
University of Auckland	64.3
University of Otago	59

Europe

University	Global Score
University of Oxford	87.6
University of Cambridge	85.8
Imperial College London	82.3
University College London	81.6
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich	78.4
University of Edinburgh	77.3
Universite Paris Saclay (ComUE)	76.8
University of Copenhagen	75.7
King’s College London	74.8
École Polytechnique Federale of Lausanne	74.7

Latin America

University	Global Score
Universidade de São Paulo	64
Pontificia University Católica de Chile	54.4
State University of Campinas	53.4
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro	52.9
University of Buenos Aires	52
National Autonomous University of Mexico	51.6
University of Chile	50.8
UNESP – Universidade Estadual Paulista	47.8
Federal University of Minas Gerais	47.7
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul	59

North America

University	Global Score
Harvard University	100
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	97.6
Stanford University	93.8
University of California–Berkeley	90.8
California Institute of Technology	85.9
Columbia University	85.6
Princeton University	84.7
University of Washington	84.6
Yale University	84.2
Johns Hopkins University	59