Ranking the World’s Top Universities

Data Visualisation — Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2023

Russell Lim
4 min readSep 5, 2023

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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.

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Russell Lim

I teach high school mathematics in Melbourne, Australia. I like thinking about interesting problems and learning new things.