TheBest Global Universities ranking byU.S. News & World Report is an annual ranking of world universities. On October 28, 2014,U.S. News, which began ranking American universities in 1983, published its inaugural global ranking, assessing 500 universities in 49 countries. That first installment of the Best Global Universities Ranking was published without prior announcement, withU.S. News later clarifying that the rankings of that year were a trial balloon for the publication's entrance into the global university rankings field. After pre-announcing the rankings of next year, in 2016, the periodical formalized the global university rankings as part of its regular annual programming. Having made official theranking methodology, it disclosed that it is based on 10 different indicators that measure universities' academic performance and reputations.[1] The ranking has since been revised and expanded to cover 1,500 institutions in 81 countries and now includes five regional and 28 subject rankings.[2] Employing 13 indicators and based largely on data provided byClarivate, theU.S. News global ranking is methodologically different from its ranking of American institutions; global universities are rated using factors such as research reputation, academic publications, and the number of highly cited papers.[3][4]
Inside Higher Ed noted in 2014 thatU.S. News is entering the international college and university rankings area that is already "dominated by three major global university rankings": theQS World University Rankings, theTimes Higher Education World University Rankings, and theAcademic Ranking of World Universities.[5]U.S. News' chief data strategist, Robert Morse, stated "we're well-known in the field for doing academic rankings so we thought it was a natural extension of the other rankings that we're doing."[5] Morse pointed out thatU.S. News is "the first American publisher to enter the global rankings space", givenTimes Higher Education andQS are both British, while the Academic Ranking of World Universities is Chinese.[5]
The Washington Post noted that some U.S. institutions rank lower onU.S. News' global ranking than on their domestic ranking, in particular Princeton, which was named the top university in the U.S. in the 2015 domestic ranking but was ranked behind nine other U.S. universities (and three U.K. universities) in the 2015 global ranking. This was attributed to the global ranking concentrating on "research prowess", while the "undergraduate experience", for which uniform international data is hard to obtain, was not included.[6]Forbes, which, along with many others, has roundlycriticized theU.S. News ranking of American colleges,[7] praised theU.S. News global ranking as being mostly based upon "objective measures" and representing a "worthy" evaluation scheme.[8]
As ofU.S. News & World Report's most recent 2024-2025 rankings, which considered 2,250 institutions from over 100 countries using 13 indicators that "measure their academic research performance and their global and regional reputations",[9] the top ten universities are:
