According to the Experts Club information and analysis centre, Harvard University has once again published the Academic Ranking of World Universities 2026 (ARWU), known as the Shanghai Ranking. It is followed by Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Cambridge took fourth place, whilst the University of California, Berkeley, came fifth.
The top ten also includes Princeton in sixth place, Oxford in seventh, Columbia University in eighth, the University of Chicago in ninth and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in tenth. Thus, eight of the world’s top ten universities are in the US, with the remaining two in the UK.
The composition of the top ten has remained unchanged since 2025, although there have been some changes in ranking. Princeton has risen from seventh to sixth place, overtaking Oxford, whilst the University of Chicago has moved up from tenth to ninth, swapping places with Caltech. Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge and Berkeley retained the top five places.
The top university outside the US and the UK is France’s Paris-Saclay University, ranked 13th. The top university in Asia – China’s Tsinghua University – rose to 18th place. ETH Zurich occupies 19th place, Peking University 22nd, whilst the University of Toronto and Zhejiang University shared 24th place.
Despite the dominance of American universities at the top of the rankings, the most notable long-term trend remains the rise of China.
In the top 100 of the 2026 ARWU, the US is represented by 37 universities, mainland China by 16 (up from 13 a year earlier), and the UK by eight. Next come Australia and Switzerland, with five universities each; France and Germany, with four each; and Canada, with three.
In total, universities from 18 countries and territories are represented in the top 100. At the same time, China’s position is rapidly strengthening: in the 2025 ARWU, mainland China had 13 universities in the top 100; now there are 16. New entrants to the top 100 include Southeast University, Tianjin University and Harbin Institute of Technology.
However, the situation is even more telling when looking at the full list of 1,000. Mainland China is represented by 234 universities, compared with 187 in the US. Thus, China already significantly outnumbers the US in terms of the breadth of its presence in the ARWU, although American universities still retain a huge advantage at the very top of the rankings.
France has 27 universities in the top 1,000, four of which are in the top 100. Apart from Paris-Saclay in 13th place, PSL University is ranked 33rd, Sorbonne University 55th and Université Paris Cité 57th.
The ARWU assesses more than 2,500 universities worldwide, but publishes only the top 1,000. Unlike other rankings, which take into account reputation among students and staff, internationalisation or the quality of the educational environment, the Shanghai Ranking focuses almost entirely on research activity.
The methodology takes into account alumni and staff who are Nobel Prize and Fields Medal laureates, Clarivate’s most highly cited researchers, publications in *Nature* and *Science*, the number of research papers in the Web of Science indices, and the research output per staff member. Consequently, the ARWU is, in fact, primarily a ranking of universities’ research strength rather than the quality of teaching per se.