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This university is the best in the world

Harvard University

Harvard University

In 5 of 5 rankings

United States

Harvard University, a private research university in the Ivy League, is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. It was founded in 1636 and named in 1639 after its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, which makes it the oldest institution of higher learning in the US. Today it has ten academic faculties plus a faculty attached to the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Harvard is No. 1 in the 2026 editions of the CWUR World University Rankings and ShanghaiRanking's Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), and in U.S. News & World Report's Best Global Universities 2026-2027; it also led all three in their previous editions. CWUR, which ranked 21,291 institutions, places Harvard first on each of its four measures (education, employability, faculty and research), while U.S. News builds its list from 13 indicators of research performance and global and regional reputation. QS World University Rankings 2027 places Harvard No. 5 and Times Higher Education's World University Rankings 2027 No. 6. Under president Charles William Eliot, from 1869 to 1909, Harvard added several professional schools and turned into a modern research university. In 1900 it co-founded the Association of American Universities, and James B. Conant later led it through the Great Depression and World War II. Its medical school dates from 1782, when it was named the Medical Institution of Harvard University.

First in our Best ’25 list (In 5 of 5 rankings): the more of the trusted rankings below name an entry, the higher its place — see Mechanics. The next editions can change it.

5 sources

Places 2 to 4

  1. 1Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyUnited States
  2. 1University of OxfordUnited Kingdom
  3. 1Stanford UniversityUnited States

The best universities in the world — the full top 10 →

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