At ̽����Ƶ we create university rankings to assess university performance on the global stage and to provide a resource for readers to understand the different missions and successes of higher education institutions.

Our rankings cover the three main missions of university activity: research, teaching and impact.

Each university in the rankings has a detailed profile, with a breakdown of its overall scores across the rankings and supplementary data designed to help students. For example, there are data on the staff-to-student ratio at each university, the total income per student, the proportion of international students and the gender breakdown of students.

Some universities have enhanced profiles to showcase their student offer and their individual strengths and qualities beyond the rankings data. To raise your university’s global profile with THE, please contact branding@timeshighereducation.com.��

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THE’s rich data have become a vital resource for students, helping them to make one of the most important decisions of their lives – who to trust with their education.

To help students get the most out of our rankings, we have a dedicated Student section, providing student-focused news and advice and featuring a wide range of student blogs with invaluable first-person advice and tips.

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The rankings are also widely used by faculty to inform career decisions, by university leaders to help set strategic priorities and by governments to help monitor policy. Why? Because the THE rankings are based on one of the richest databases of university performance in the world.

Ten ways THE has improved the university rankings landscape

One ranking to rule them all? Absolutely not

Research rankings

The THE World University Rankings, founded in 2004, have an emphasis on the research mission.

Our carefully balanced and comprehensive methodology was developed after more than a decade of working in consultation with the world’s leading universities, and builds on our team’s deep understanding of what makes a university truly world class.

Our team of data experts evaluates world-class universities against 18 separate performance indicators, covering the full range of a top university’s essential areas of activity: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

THE’s rich data has become a vital study advice resource for students, helping them to make one of the most important decisions of their lives – who to trust with their education.

The overall THE World University Rankings, featuring more than 2,000 institutions, are accompanied by a series of subject-specific rankings to help students determine where to study: 

• Arts and Humanities
• Business and Economics
• Computer Science
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• Engineering
• Law
• Life Sciences
• Medical and Health
• Physical Sciences
• Psychology
• Social Sciences

All the rankings tables can be filtered by country and can be personalised to create a new rankings against any one of five key areas of performance, to suit user preferences.

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You can read more about why THE’s methodology is trusted by students and watch our 90-second student guide to the rankings methodology below.

To create the THE World University Rankings 2026 list, THE’s data team drew on a comprehensive and growing database containing hundreds of thousands of data points on more than 3,100 global research universities, and employed a global Academic Reputation Survey of more than 108,000 leading scholars, who provided us with their expert views on the world’s leading universities.

In addition, we also analysed 174.9 million citations to 18.7 million academic publications (from Elsevier’s Scopus database) published over a five-year period between 2020 and 2024.

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As well as the flagship THE World University Rankings, THE has drawn on its rich database, and in some cases collected additional data, to create a series of regional and thematic rankings, offering deeper insights into a wider range of universities against a wider range of missions, and providing students with even greater resources. Our major rankings are:

• Asia University Rankings
  This is focused on universities in Asia.��The methodology gives more weight to knowledge transfer, research income and research productivity, while teaching and research reputation count for less. This reflects Asian universities’ close ties to industry as well as the fact they tend to be younger than their Western counterparts and, therefore, are typically not as well known or well regarded across the world.
  Click to read analysis of the 2026 results
• Latin America University Rankings
  This includes universities in the Latin America and Caribbean region. The methodology gives less weight to citation impact and more weight to teaching and research environment metrics.
  Read our analysis of the Latin America University Rankings 2026 results
• Arab University Rankings
  This includes universities in the Middle East and North Africa. The methodology include three bespoke metrics, while the calculations of some of the other metrics have been adjusted to reflect the features of universities in the Arab world.��
  Read our analysis of the Arab University Rankings 2026 results
• Interdisciplinary Science Rankings
  �ճ����second edition of the ranking was published in November 2025. It lists the world's top universities for interdisciplinary research in science disciplines.
  Read our analysis of the Interdisciplinary Science Rankings 2026 results

About ‘reporter’ institutions

We are very grateful to universities for supplying the breadth and depth of data required, and for working with us to verify and validate these data. This represents a huge effort for both the THE team and for the many people at universities who work hard to prepare and check the data.

Every year, despite these efforts, we have to exclude some universities from the rankings because our rankings methodology has very strict criteria for entry. To recognise those institutions, we have denoted a “reporter” status. This status indicates that they are active participants in the rankings process, even though they have not been ranked this year. They are listed alphabetically at the end of the rankings table, and rather than being assigned a rank number, they are instead labelled reporter institutions.

Sustainability Impact Ratings

�ճ����Sustainability Impact Ratings – formerly the Impact Rankings – launched in April 2019. They are still the only global league tables that assess universities against the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We publish one overall rating alongside 17 tables showing universities' progress towards delivering each of the SDGs.

We use carefully calibrated indicators to provide comprehensive and balanced comparisons across four broad areas: research, outreach, stewardship and teaching.��

The Sustainability Impact Ratings are underpinned by a Sustainability Impact Network membership community.��

Read more about the new Sustainability Impact Ratings and Sustainability Impact Network, including a list of frequently asked questions.��If you have any further questions, email impact@timeshighereducation.com.

Click to read analysis of the latest results

Previous rankings

Between 2017 and 2022, we published the US College Rankings, in partnership with the Wall Street Journal. We no longer publish this ranking.

In 2024, we published the Online Learning Rankings. This has now been discontinued.

Between 2017 and 2025, we published the Japan University Rankings, in partnership with Benesse. This has now been discontinued.

Universities that were previously ranked in these tables are encouraged to participate in our World University Rankings, Sustainability Impact Ratings and other rankings instead.��

Our core values

We maintain editorial independence when producing our rankings. Our approach is enshrined in five core values, which we call TRAITs: truthfulness, relevance, accountability, independence and transparency. Read more about our core values here.

For the latest rankings-related news, follow us on X  and register with us to sign up for our newsletters. Join our community of global higher education leaders at one of our summits for the exclusive launch of the latest THE ranking for that region.

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