ShanghaiRanking’s 2021 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)

August 27, 2021

ShanghaiRanking Consultancy has released the highly-anticipated 2021 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).

Since 2003, ARWU has ranked universities globally “based on transparent methodology and objective third-party data.” ARWU ranks more than 1,800 universities each year and publishes a list of the top 1,000 institutions.

To arrive at its results, ARWU uses six objective indicators, including:

The number of alumni and faculty awarded Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals
The number of articles published in nature and science journals
The number of highly cited researchers chosen by Clarivate Analytics
The number of articles published in nature and science journals
The number of Highly Cited Researchers and articles indexed in the Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index
A university’s per capita performance

ApplyBoard Partner Institutions

ApplyBoard wants to congratulate our 68 partner universities across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States who were included in the 2021 Academic Ranking of World Universities! We’re honoured to work with all of our partner institutions on our shared mission to educate the world.

Top 50 Universities for 2021

Here are the top 50 universities in the 2021 Academic Ranking of World Universities. Universities within the same rank range are listed alphabetically.

You can find the complete list of the top 1,000 universities and additional details on the methodologies ShanghaiConsultancy uses to rank them on ShanghaiRanking’s website.

World Rank	Institution	Country/Region	National/Regional Rank
1	Harvard University	United States	1
2	Stanford University	United States	2
3	University of Cambridge	United Kingdom	1
4	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	United States	3
5	University of California, Berkeley	United States	4
6	Princeton University	United States	5
7	University of Oxford	United Kingdom	2
8	Columbia University	United States	6
9	California Institute of Technology	United States	7
10	University of Chicago	United States	8
11	Yale University	United States	9
12	Cornell University	United States	10
13	Paris-Saclay University	France	1
14	University of California, Los Angeles	United States	11
15	University of Pennsylvania	United States	12
16	Johns Hopkins University	United States	13
17	University College London	United Kingdom	3
18	University of California, San Diego	United States	14
19	University of Washington	United States	15
20	University of California, San Francisco	United States	16
21	ETH Zurich	Switzerland	1
22	University of Toronto	Canada	1
23	Washington University in St. Louis	United States	17
24	The University of Tokyo	Japan	1
25	Imperial College London	United Kingdom	4
26	University of Michigan – Ann Arbor	United States	18
27	New York University	United States	19
28	Tsinghua University	China	1
29	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	United States	20
30	University of Copenhagen	Denmark	1
31	University of Wisconsin – Madison	United States	21
32	Duke University	United States	22
33	The University of Melbourne	Australia	1
34	Northwestern University	United States	23
35	Sorbonne University	France	2
35	The University of Manchester	United Kingdom	5
37	Kyoto University	Japan	2
38	PSL University	France	3
38	The University of Edinburgh	United Kingdom	6
40	University of Minnesota, Twin Cities	United States	24
41	The University of Texas at Austin	United States	25
42	Karolinska Institute	Sweden	1
42	Rockefeller University	United States	26
42	University of British Columbia	Canada	2
45	Peking University	China	2
46	University of Colorado at Boulder	United States	27
47	King’s College London	United Kingdom	7
48	The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas	United States	28
48	University of Munich	Germany	1
50	Utrecht University	Netherlands	1