Harvard still first worldwide, ETH Zurich in nineteenth place

Harvard remains first in the academic ranking of world universities published by ShanghaiRanking Consultancy. Stanford follows, then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley.

The highest-placed institution in continental Europe is Paris-Saclay, in thirteenth. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich is nineteenth, the best of the Swiss institutions. The University of Geneva follows in 49th place, the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne in 54th, the University of Zurich in 59th and the University of Basel in 81st.

Across the top thousand institutions, China is the most represented country with 234 entries. The United States has 187, the United Kingdom 57, Germany 51 and Italy 42.

What this ranking measures

The Shanghai list rests on six criteria, all tied to research. It counts Nobel prizes and Fields medals won by alumni and staff, the number of researchers among the most cited according to Clarivate Analytics, publications in the journals Nature and Science, the total of indexed articles, and the result weighted by the size of the institution.

That design explains both the stability of the top places and the limits of the tool. A university with a long history of Nobel prizes keeps a lead that is hard to close, while teaching quality, access to study and graduate employment do not enter the calculation. Swiss universities do better in rankings that weight scores by student numbers, since institutions here are small compared with the American and Chinese giants.

For Italian-speaking Switzerland the closest reference remains the Università della Svizzera italiana, which by size and specialisation does not appear in the top thousand of this list but does feature in subject rankings, particularly in communication and architecture.