McGill slipped hard in a new university ranking but other Canadian schools continue to climb

McGill University has spent years as Quebec’s flagship entry on global university rankings, routinely landing among the world’s top research institutions.

This year’s numbers, though, tell a different story.

According to the 2026 National Taiwan University (NTU) Rankings, which evaluate thousands of universities worldwide based purely on research output and citation impact, McGill landed at 53rd place overall, with a score of 63.5. That’s down from 50th place a year earlier, when it scored 64.4, meaning McGill has slipped just outside the world’s top 50 for the first time in recent years.

This isn’t the only time McGill has seen a noticeable decline on global academic rankings. Over the summer, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, better known as the Shanghai Ranking, ranked the Montreal school 73rd overall, giving it one of its lowest scores in years:

• 2022: 73rd
• 2023: 70th
• 2024: 74th
• 2025: 76th
• 2026: 73rd

Meanwhile, most other Canadian universities on the NTU Rankings list actually improved this year.

Université de Montréal climbed to 109th place with a score of 58.6, up from 116th previously. The University of British Columbia edged up to 32nd place, from 33rd the year before. The University of Alberta moved to 85th place, up from 88th. McMaster University also showed up on the list at 111th.

The one constant was the University of Toronto, which held its ground at 4th place overall, still the highest-ranked Canadian university by a wide margin and sitting just behind global names like Harvard, Stanford, and University College London.

The NTU rankings are built entirely around research metrics, things like published studies, citation counts, and academic influence, rather than campus life or student experience. So this shift doesn’t necessarily say anything about what it’s actually like to study at McGill day to day.

What it does suggest is that McGill’s research output grew more slowly this year than several peer institutions, including a handful of other Canadian schools that moved up while McGill moved down.

You can explore the full 2026 rankings here.

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