THE World University Rankings 2024

The UK’s University of Oxford has retained the top spot for the seventh consecutive year in the recently released World University Rankings (WUR) 2023 by Times Higher Education (THE). Harvard University, which retained the spot for the USA’s top-ranked, follows Oxford. Harvard tops the teaching indicator, while Oxford topped in the research pillar. 

The University of Cambridge (up from 5th) and Stanford University (up from 4th) shared third place, while the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was ranked fifth. The US continued to dominate with 177 universities ranked overall, including seven in the world’s top ten.

Top 10 Universities in THE WUR 2023

A record number of 1,799 universities from 104 countries and regions are included in WUR this year – 137 more than last year – making it the largest edition in the 19-year history of the rankings. 

The rankings provide a rigorous overview of a university’s quality, drawing on an analysis of 15.5 million research publications and 121 million citations to those publications, in tandem with over 40,000 responses to an annual academic reputation survey and hundreds of thousands of additional data points encapsulating university’s international outlook, teaching environment, and industry links. Institutions are measured across 13 distinct performance metrics, providing the most comprehensive picture of excellence among world-class research universities.