No pressure, but where you decide to go to uni will probably set the course for the rest of your life, so it’s kind of important to pick the right place to study. And while some of us might opt for stuff like a good-looking campus or opportunities to study abroad, many prospective students are primarily concerned with good old academic excellence.
The Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings is a trusted league table that ranks institutions based on just that, and the 2026 list has just landed. Eighteen performance indicators are considered to create the list, including teaching, research environment, research quality, industry and international outlook – in other words, the unis that rank highly are the absolute cream of the crop.
So, what exactly is the world’s best university for 2026? For the tenth year in a row, the University of Oxford has topped the ranking, receiving a near-perfect overall score of 98.2. The British university – considered the oldest university in the English-speaking world – is particularly strong in research environment, in which it scored a perfect 100.
Second up is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, with an overall score of 97.7. Princeton University and University of Cambridge ranked joint-third.
Institutions in the US occupy seven of the top 10 spots, while the other three are represented by universities in Britain. Read on for the full top 10.
The 10 best universities in the world for 2026
- University of Oxford, UK
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
- Princeton University, USA
- University of Cambridge, UK
- Harvard University, USA
- Stanford University, USA
- California Institute of Technology, USA
- Imperial College London, UK
- University of California, Berkeley, USA
- Yale University, USA
Did your uni make the list? Check out the full Times Higher Education ranking here.
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