NYC University Named One Of World's Best: Ranking

MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, NY — Columbia University is often ranked near the top of lists compiling the best schools in the United States, and it does just as well when the study is expanded to the rest of the world, according to a new ranking.

The Morningside Heights ivy league placed as the No. 8 school in the world in the U.S. News & World Report's fifth-annual ranking of the "Best Global Universities," according to the publications. The ranking, released on Tuesday, compared 1,250 schools across 75 countries.

Columbia University was far-and-ahead the top global school in New York City. New York University (No. 28) was the only other undergraduate university to rank in the top 200 on the list. The next highest schools were Yeshiva University (No. 245) followed by City College (No. 669, Hunter College (No. 853) and Fordham University (No. 1005).

Two specialized medical schools — Rockefeller University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai — were ranked No. 66 and No. 75 respectively, according to the U.S. News & World Report.

The United States dominated the rankings with 227 schools making the list, according to the U.S. News & World Report.

Here are the country’s top 10 universities and their global ranks:

1. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (1)
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (2)
3. Stanford University, Stanford, CA (3)
4. University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA (4)
5. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA (6)
6. Columbia University, New York, NY (8)
7. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ (9)
8. University of Washington, Seattle, WA (10)
9. Yale University, New Haven, CT (11)
10. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (12)

China had the second most institutions on the list with 130, followed by the United Kingdom with 78, Japan with 67, and Germany with 62. Three of the top 10 schools in engineering and four of the top 10 schools in computer science were based in China, including Tsinghua University, which ranked No. 1 in both subjects.

However, the U.S. performed among the best in four subjects: neuroscience and behavior, economics and business, computer science and engineering.

“When we first started publishing Best Global Universities, the rankings evaluated 500 schools in 11 countries,” Robert Morse, chief data strategist at U.S. News, said in a release. “Since then, we’ve added 750 schools and have expanded to 75 nations. One thing has remained the same: Schools that prioritize quality academic research remain at the top of the rankings.”

A pool of 1,372 universities were evaluated for the global rankings, which focused on academic research and reputation rather than their separate undergraduate or graduate programs. Thirteen separate ranking factors were used to determine the rankings, specifically: indicators that measure a school’s reputation and so-called bibliometric indicators that measure academic research performance, including citations and publications.
Click here to read more on the methodology.

Patch national staffer Dan Hampton contributed to this report.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images News/Getty Images