Ranking the World’s Top Universities

Data Visualisation — Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2023

Chart by author

For hundreds of years, universities have played a central role in human progress. They have been cradles of innovation and the birthplace of societal transformations.

Students (and their parents) are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of learning from the best and brightest minds, not to mention the weight that name like Stanford or Cambridge can give to a job application.

With so much at stake, it is no wonder that many people are interested in ranking the world’s top universities. Some of the most famous ranking systems are Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Times Higher Education (THE) and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).

I chose the Times Higher Education rankings for this visualisation (not because of the cool acronym — THE Rankings 😎) because they consider a broader range of relevant ranking metrics compared to QS or ARWU.

The chart below shows the top 50 universities, according to THE World Rankings 2023.

Chart by author

Comments on the Rankings

Geographic distribution

I was somewhat surprised that 23 out of the top 50 ranked universities are the United States! Not to take anything away from y’all over there in the US of A, but I have some comments on the reasons for this in the methodology section below.

The next most represented locations are United Kingdom (7) and China (4).

None of the Indian Universities made the top 50, nor top 100, nor top 200! I wonder what Sundar Pichai and other IIT graduates would have to say about that?

Teaching vs Research

If you rank based on the Teaching metric alone, the top 5 becomes

1. Harvard
2. Stanford
3. Yale
4. Peking University
5. Oxford