It’s no easy task choosing where you want to spend your undergraduate years. Some of us crave adventure abroad, others want somewhere closer to home; high-achievers will evaluate the best academic standing, while the social butterflies will be assessing the extra-curricular culture.
Thankfully, the annual QS World Universities Ranking has just landed to shed some light on which institutions stand in the best stead for 2026, and the same world-famous US college has topped the ranks.
For the fourteenth consecutive year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (more commonly referred to as MIT) in Cambridge, USA has ranked as the world’s most outstanding university.
More than 1,500 institutions were assessed this year, and MIT gained a perfect score of 100. Its strongest categories include academic reputation, the number of citations per faculty, and its reputation among employers. It also scored 93.8 for sustainability, and 94.1 for its international research network.
Imperial College London also retained its second-place spot, beating its historic British counterparts Oxford and Cambridge. In third place was Stanford University. American institutions claimed nine of the top 20 spots – read on to see which ones.
These are the 20 best universities in the world
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
- Imperial College London, UK
- Stanford University, USA
- University of Oxford, UK
- Harvard University, USA
- University of Cambridge, UK
- ETH Zurich, Switzerland
- National University of Singapore, Singapore
- University College London, UK
- California Institute of Technology, USA
- The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
- University of Chicago, USA
- Peking University, China
- University of Pennsylvania, USA
- Cornell University, USA
- Tsinghua University, China
- University of California, Berkeley, USA
- University of Melbourne, Australia
- University of New South Wales, Australia
- Yale University, USA
To read QS Top Universities full top 50 ranking, head to the website.
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