McGill University has long been considered one of the crown jewels of Canadian post-secondary education, and by most measures it still is. But a new global ranking suggests the Montreal institution has some ground to make up.
The Center for World University Rankings released its 2026 edition this week, evaluating 21,291 institutions worldwide across four categories: quality of education, employability, faculty quality and research output. McGill came in at 28th globally, a slight slip from the 27th place finish it held in both 2024 and 2025.
It’s a marginal drop, but it does mean McGill missed the top 25 for another year, sitting just outside a tier dominated almost entirely by American and British institutions. Harvard topped the list with a perfect score of 100, followed by MIT and Stanford. The University of Cambridge and Oxford rounded out the top five. The first non-English-speaking institution to crack the top 20 was PSL University of France, which came in at 20th.
On the Canadian front, McGill’s 28th place finish still makes it the second-ranked university in the country behind the University of Toronto, which placed 23rd. The University of British Columbia came in third among Canadian schools at 49th globally.
McGill’s score of 87.0 places it in the top 0.2% of all ranked institutions worldwide.
And while McGill only suffered a slight dip in this particular ranking, it hasn’t fared as well across the board. When TIME and Statista released their own 2026 global university list earlier this year, McGill landed at 154th overall, well behind U of T at 24th and UBC at 33rd.
The full CWUR Global 2000 list is available at cwur.org.
