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Find the most influential colleges and universities in the world in nearly 25 academic disciplines

Find brilliant thinkers for your research papers and bibliographies. Using our proprietary AI program, we have ranked everyone in Wikipedia, Wikidata, Schematic Scholar, and CrossRef based on the number of citations, publications, and academically relevant web presence. This is how we find the most influential people in the world.

We then gather all the faculty and alumni associated with a college or university and attribute the people’s influence to their schools. Hence, the most influential schools are those that employ and graduate the most influential faculty and alumni.

Students and parents now have the easiest and fastest way to find colleges and universities with histories of impacting the world through their scholarship. If you ever wanted to find schools that have the most influence in engineering or in literature, you now can!

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If you are searching for your ideal college , our Build Your Own College Rankings tool has more options to help you find the right school for your degree. Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential schools in Biology, for the years 2000 – 2022

Harvard University is almost universally acclaimed as the world’s most prestigious university. There is little doubt that its towering reputation is well earned. For starters, some 150 Nobel laureates have either studied or taught at the school—more than at any other university in the world. Moreover, over 40 international heads of state or government have passed through its gates. Of these, eight were US Presidents (the most of any college or university):

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Jeremy Waldron ranks among our Top Influential Legal Scholars Today. The University of Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world, which affords it an aura of awe and respect that no amount of money can buy. If Cambridge was preeminent in the analytical philosophy tradition during the twentieth century, Oxford was far more important for the Scholastic philosophical tradition during the High Middle Ages. For example, the great Scottish metaphysician John Duns Scotus (his name means, roughly, “John, of the village of Duns, in Scotland”) was in residence here during the 1290s, and again briefly between 1302 and 1304, between stays at the University of Paris.

Stanford University was founded by Leland Stanford, a wealthy railroad magnate and erstwhile US Senator from California, as well as a former Governor of the Golden State. He placed the university in an unincorporated area about 30 miles south of San Francisco, adjacent to the town of Palo Alto (which he also founded). The campus lies in what is now known as Silicon Valley, which contributes greatly to the immense intellectual and economic influence of the private, research university that still bears the Stanford family name. Today, Stanford University is perhaps the closest thing to a true Ivy League school on the West Coast.

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Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is one of the oldest universities in the world (or, at least, in Europe, not to prejudge the claims of several Islamic institutions to that title). It was founded only a little more than a century after the University of Bologna (1088) and the University of Oxford (1096) – which are the oldest and second-oldest universities in Europe – and about half a century after the University of Paris (1150). Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world, after Oxford. With more than 800 years of continuous operation, Cambridge has been home to a great many luminaries of the academic firmament during this long expanse of time.

Yale was originally founded under the name of Collegiate School by Connecticut Colony in 1701. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher learning in the US, after Harvard, the College of William & Mary (in Williamsburg, Virginia), and St. John’s College (in Annapolis, Maryland). Called the “Collegiate School,” its original mission was to train future ministers for the Congregational Church. Yale is known as an all-around powerhouse, not unlike Harvard, with strength in a wide variety of fields. For one thing, five US presidents have passed through Yale, the second-highest number after Harvard.

The University of California, Berkeley is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant university and the first campus of the University of California system. Its fourteen colleges and schools offer over 350 degree programs and enroll some 31,800 undergraduate and 13,200 graduate students. Berkeley has consistently ranked among the world's top universities.

Johns Hopkins was designed from its origin to contribute to the cutting edge of scientific discovery. With time, this goal has been fully achieved, leading to the top-tier research institution that the university is today. The school is named after its founding benefactor, the entrepreneur and philanthropist Johns Hopkins, who contributed $7 million (approximately $145 million in today’s money) to create both the university and an associated hospital. The educational philosophy of Hopkins (who had also been a noted abolitionist) and the university’s first president, the distinguished educator ...

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Columbia is the eleventh-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. After New Jersey founded its college (now Princeton University) in 1746, New Yorkers, not wishing to be outdone, established their own college just eight years later. Its original name was King’s College. However, following the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and George Washington’s final victory at Yorktown in 1781, King George III found himself in bad odor throughout the former colonies. So, in 1784 King’s College was formally rechristened in honor of Christopher Columbus. (With that doughty explorer bei...

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In the 1850s, the Governor of Washington Territory and some of his Seattle-based friends and business associates, including a prominent Methodist minister, put their heads together to figure out a way to advance two causes close to their hearts: the prospect of statehood for the territory and the economic welfare of the city of Seattle. At first, the Seattle city fathers argued in favor of moving the territorial capital from Olympia to their own city. However, a better plan was eventually decided upon: they would build a university in Seattle. The idea was that an institution of higher educati...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded shortly before the American Civil War and universally known as “MIT,” is located just across the Charles River from downtown Boston. Starting from the MIT campus, if you walk, cycle, or drive in a westerly direction along Massachusetts Avenue (“Mass Ave,” to the locals), or ride the Red Line underneath it, you soon arrive at Harvard Square, with the bulk of the town of Cambridge sandwiched in between. Thus, MIT is not unlike a bookend paired with Harvard, geographically speaking, and academically speaking, as well, it looks upon itself very much as the equal of the older school.

University College London, which operates as UCL, is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. It is a member institution of the federal University of London, and is the second-largest university in the United Kingdom by total enrolment and the largest by postgraduate enrolment.

Cornell University was founded in turbulent times. With the Civil War winding down, and less than two weeks after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the Governor of New York signed the school’s official charter in the state capital, Albany, where only the day before Lincoln’s funeral procession had passed through the city’s streets. Two men were behind the drive to establish a first-class university in upstate New York: wealthy businessman Ezra Cornell, the founder of Western Union, who was originally from Ithaca (where the new school was to be located), and Andrew Dickson White, a prominent historian and educator, who hailed from nearby Syracuse.

The University of Chicago is one of the foremost universities in the world academically, albeit one of the youngest in that august company. In spite of its relatively recent founding, the school has been associated with some of the world’s most important scientific achievements, above all, the first controlled, self-sustaining, nuclear chain reaction (atomic fission), which was achieved in late 1942 by a team led by the legendary Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, in a laboratory beneath a football field on the Chicago campus. In another first, in 1952 then-graduate student Stanley Miller, with ...

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The University of Pennsylvania (commonly known as “Penn”) is a leading private research university (note that nearly all US universities named after their state are public-supported—Penn is an exception to this rule). The sixth-oldest institution of higher learning in the country, Penn was the brain child of American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, who also served as its first president. Franklin’s educational ideas were highly innovative for the time, inclining more towards the teaching of practical skills and preparation for the learned professions, in contrast to the traditional curricul...

The University of California, San Diego is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is the southernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California, and offers over 200 undergraduate and graduate degree programs, enrolling 33,343 undergraduate and 9,533 graduate students. The university occupies near the coast of the Pacific Ocean, with the main campus resting on approximately . UC San Diego is ranked among the best universities in the world by major college and univer...

The University of California, Los Angeles is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA’s academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California State Normal School . This school was absorbed with the official founding of UCLA as the Southern Branch of the University of California in 1919, making it the second-oldest of the 10-campus University of California system .

Marshall Sahlins ranks among our Top Influential Anthropologists Today. Michael J. Fischer ranks among our Top Influential Computer Scientists Today. The flagship campuses of many of the state university systems have superb faculties and excellent academic reputations. However, setting aside Berkeley as a special case, by our criteria the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus is the most distinguished of all these many fine institutions. That is, Michigan has a strong claim to be considered (after Berkeley) the best public research university in the US. One thing in Michigan’s favor is i...

The University of California, San Francisco is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and it is dedicated entirely to health science. It conducts research and teaching in medical and biological sciences.

The University of Toronto received its royal charter in 1827 from King George IV. Originally known as King’s College, it was the first institution of higher learning in the colonial Province of Upper Canada (consisting of mostly what is now southern Ontario). King’s College was a religious institution, operating under the auspices of the Church of England. In 1850, the university was transferred to a secular administration, at which time it also assumed its present name. Today, the university comprises 11 schools at its principal location in downtown Toronto’s Queen’s Park neighborhood, as well as two satellite campuses.

Duke began life as Brown’s Schoolhouse, on a site in what is now the town of Trinity in Randolph County, North Carolina, a little over 70 miles west of its current location in the city of Durham. The small school experienced rapid growth in the years leading up to the Civil War, and underwent a succession of name changes: to Union Institute Academy (1841), Normal College (1851), and Trinity College (1859). In its cultural roots, the Methodist and Quaker faiths both loom large. Finally, in 1892 the still-growing college was gifted with a major endowment from the wealthy tobacco entrepreneur, philanthropist, and devout Methodist, Washington Duke.

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The Rockefeller University is a private graduate-only university in New York City. It focuses primarily on the biological and medical sciences and provides doctoral and postdoctoral education. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". Rockefeller is the oldest biomedical research institute in the United States. The 82-person faculty has 37 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 members of the National Academy of Medicine, seven Lasker Award recipients, and five Nobel laureates. As of March 2022, a total of 26 Nobel laureates have been affiliated wit...

Although only the ninth-oldest university in the country, Princeton is one of the most historic. Originally founded as the College of New Jersey, the school’s sixth presidents, the Scottish theologian and educator John Witherspoon, signed the Declaration of Independence—the only college leader to do so. The next year, George Washington’s colonials dealt a small but significant blow to Lord Cornwallis’s superior forces at the Battle of Princeton on January 3, 1777. The victories at the earlier Battle of Trenton and at Princeton had an important positive effect on American morale, leading to increased enlistments in Washington’s army.

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The California Institute of Technology (universally known as “Caltech”) is located in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena. It was originally founded as a vocational school, but took on the complexion of an institute at the cutting edge of scientific discovery quite early in its history. The inflection point probably came with the move of Alfred Amos Noyes from MIT (where he had been serving as acting-President) to Caltech in 1919. Noyes, who had studied chemistry under Wilhelm Ostwald at the University of Leipzig, taught chemistry at Caltech for 17 years, until his death in 1936. During his ten...

Kyoto University, or KyotoU, is a public research university located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded in 1897, it is one of the former Imperial Universities and the second oldest university in Japan. KyotoU is consistently ranked amongst the top two in Japan, the top ten in Asia, and the world's top fifty institutions of higher education.

The University of Minnesota (UM) traces its roots to a college preparatory school established in the city of Minneapolis seven years before Minnesota entered the Union in 1858. This school closed its doors during the Civil War, but reopened in 1867. In 1869, the prep school was reconfigured as an institution of higher learning. Today, that modest college has grown into one of the largest universities in the country, with a student population of around 52,000. During the 1880s, UM expanded to another campus located in St. Paul, the state capital and the city immediately adjacent to Minneapolis to the east.

The University of Tokyo, abbreviated as Todai or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university is the first Imperial University and currently selected as a Top Type university of Top Global University Project by the Japanese government.

Samuel Moyn ranks among our Top Influential Historians Today. Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL), which is located in an unincorporated area just west of the St. Louis city limits, was founded in 1853. WUSTL’s student body is highly diversified, including individuals from all 50 states and some 120 foreign countries. The university is divided into seven undergraduate, graduate, and professional colleges and schools, which together offer nearly 1900 courses leading to more than 90 different academic degrees. Among WUSTL’s most popular programs are those in engineering, in biological and biomedical sciences, and in social sciences.

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As the cultural mecca of the US, New York City naturally contains many fine colleges and universities. One of the very best is New York University (NYU), located in Washington Square in Lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. While NYU is a quintessentially urban school lacking a conventional, pastoral college campus setting, its site is immediately recognizable thanks to Washington Square Arch, which is a replica of the ancient Roman Arch of Titus and very similar in appearance to Paris’s celebrated Arc de Triomphe (though only half its size). One of the principal founders of NYU wa...

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In spite of dating back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the University of Edinburgh is only the fourth-oldest university in Scotland (after St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen), hence the sixth-oldest in the English-speaking world (with Oxford and Cambridge, of course, in first and second positions). As the city of Edinburgh itself grew in importance, however, its university also came to dominate its Scottish rivals. That is why, for such a relatively “young” university, Edinburgh is associated with a quite remarkable list of intellectual luminaries, including the following, including, during the seventeenth century, the well-known Presbyterian theologian, Samuel Rutherford.

Baylor College of Medicine is a private, independent health sciences center in Houston, Texas within the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical center. BCM is composed of four academic components: the School of Medicine, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; the School of Health Professions, and the National School of Tropical Medicine.

The Karolinska Institute is a research-led medical university in Solna within the Stockholm urban area of Sweden. The Karolinska Institute is consistently ranked amongst the world's best medical schools, ranking 6th worldwide for medicine in 2021. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The assembly consists of fifty professors from various medical disciplines at the university. The current rector of Karolinska Institute is Ole Petter Ottersen, who took office in August 2017.

The University of British Columbia (UBC) was founded in 1908. For the first several decades of its existence, the university’s activities were modest in scope. In 1925 a bold program to transform UBC into a modern research university was put into effect. At this time the main campus was transferred from the Fairview neighborhood just south of downtown Vancouver, to a larger campus at Point Grey about six miles to the west. Today, UBC is the third-largest university in Canada. In addition to the main campus there is a satellite campus in the city of Kelowna. In all, the UBC student body tops 66,000 souls.

Massachusetts General Hospital is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School located in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It is the third oldest general hospital in the United States and has a capacity of 999 beds. With Brigham and Women's Hospital, it is one of the two founding members of Mass General Brigham , the largest healthcare provider in Massachusetts. Massachusetts General Hospital conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the world, with an annual research budget of more than $1 billion in 2019. It is currently ranked as the #8 best hospital in the United States by U.S.

McGill University is the direct descendent of McGill College, founded by royal charter in 1821 and largely funded by a bequest from the Scottish-born Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist, James McGill. The university took its present name in 1885. Though situated on the slopes of Mount Royal in the heart of French-speaking Montreal (with a satellite campus on the westernmost tip of Montreal Island), McGill was founded as an English-speaking institution, and remains so to this day. Today, McGill is a flourishing, internationally focused university with a student body of around 40,000—one of the largest in Canada.

Paris-Saclay University is a research university based in Paris, France. It is one of the 13 prestigious universities that were produced from the division of the University of Paris, known as the Sorbonne. It is ranked 1st in France and 13th in the world in the Academic Ranking of World Universities ranking. In subject rankings, it is placed 1st in the world for Mathematics and 9th in the world for Physics, as well as being in the top 15 for Medicine and Agriculture.

The University of Copenhagen is a public research university in Copenhagen, Denmark. Founded in 1479, the University of Copenhagen is the second-oldest university in Scandinavia after Uppsala University, and ranks as one of the top universities in the Nordic countries and Europe.

George Yancy ranks among our Top Influential Philosophers Today. University of Pittsburgh (“Pitt”) traces its roots to the Pittsburgh Academy, a preparatory school founded in 1787, when Pittsburgh was still a frontier outpost. Defined in this way, Pitt is the oldest continuously chartered educational institution west of the Allegheny Mountains. The city of Pittsburgh itself has an interesting history. It was founded in 1758 in conjunction with the construction of Fort Pitt, near the point where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to form the Ohio River. This act of founding occurred dur...

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The origins of Imperial College London (ICL) can be traced back to the Royal College of Chemistry, founded in 1845. In 1853, this school was merged with the Royal School of Mines, established two years previously. The modern Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ICL’s official name) was established by royal charter in 1907 through merger of the Royal School of Mines with the Royal College of Chemistry and the City and Guilds College. Imperial College Medical School was formed in 1988 through merger with St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School (itself dating back to 1845), while in 2004 a brand-new Imperial College Business School opened its doors.

The University of Florida (UF) traces its roots back to East Florida Seminary, which was founded in 1853 in the town of Ocala. The seminary, which was the first publicly supported institution of higher learning in the state, relocated to the city of Gainesville in 1858. Another public institution, the Florida Agricultural College, was established in Lake City in 1884, while the St. Petersburg Normal and Industrial School was established in 1893. In 1895, a fourth public institution, the South Florida Military and Educational Institute, was established in Bartow. Its name was changed to South Florida Military College in 1903.

The University of Wisconsin was founded at the same time that the eastern part of the Wisconsin Territory became the new state of Wisconsin and entered the union. In accord with its charter, the new state university was physically located in the state capital, Madison. Today, the University of Wisconsin System has grown into an immense network of more than 180,000 students distributed across some 26 campuses. However, the original Madison location still remains the flagship campus with the largest student body (around 44,000 students) and the most distinguished faculty. The university’s $3 billion endowment allows it to rank third in the US for expenditures on fundamental research.

The University of California, Davis is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The institution was first founded as an agricultural branch of the system in 1905 and became the seventh campus of the University of California in 1959.

Osaka University, abbreviated as Handai, is a public research university located in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. It is one of Japan's former Imperial Universities and a Designated National University listed as a "Top Type" university in the Top Global University Project. The university is often ranked among the top three public universities in Japan, along with the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University. It is ranked third overall among Japanese universities and 75th worldwide in the 2022 QS World University Rankings.

Ada Yonath ranks among our Top Influential Chemists Today. David Gross ranks among our Top Influential Physicists Today. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded in 1918 in the ancient city of Jerusalem. At the time the city, as well as the entire surrounding region of Palestine, was under British military control. The founding occurred during the interim period between the British defeat of the Ottoman Turkish army in late 1917 and the official establishment of British Mandatory Palestine by the League of Nations in the summer of 1922. Planning for a Jewish university in the Holy Land had long figured in the plans of the leaders of the Zionist movement.

The University of Southern California (USC) was founded as the first private research university in the state (five years before Stanford) largely through the efforts of Judge Robert Widney, one of the most prominent citizens of Los Angeles at that time. Widney’s vision was of an inclusive institution that would serve all sectors of the already-diverse LA community. Accordingly, the board of trustees he assembled included a wealthy Protestant businessman, a Catholic former-governor, and a Jewish banker. While USC was officially affiliated with the Methodist church during its early years, from the beginning its charter provided that no student would be denied admission on the basis of race.

The Weizmann Institute of Science is a public research university in Rehovot, Israel, established in 1934, 14 years before the State of Israel. It differs from other Israeli universities in that it offers only postgraduate degrees in the natural and exact sciences.

The University of Vienna was founded by the Habsburg ruler, Rudolf IV, Duke of Austria. This monarch was known as “Rudolf der Stifter” [Rudolf the Founder] on account of his fondness for building new cathedrals and monasteries, as well as the university. He may also have been motivated by rivalry with his Central European peers, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV (who had established Charles University in Prague just a few years earlier, in 1348) and Casimir III (known as “Casimir the Great”), King of Poland (who had founded Jagiellonian University in Kraków one year earlier, in 1364). Vienna ...

The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen , is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The University of Tübingen is one of eleven German Excellence Universities. The University of Tübingen is especially known as a centre for the study of plant biology, medicine, law, archeology, ancient cultures, philosophy, theology, and religious studies as well as more recently as center of excellence for artificial intelligence. The university's noted alumni include presidents, EU Commissioners, and judges of the Federal Constitutional Court.

Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) was founded in 1855 as the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania. In 1862, the school’s name was changed to the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania. In 1874 it was changed once again, this time to Pennsylvania State College, at which time a classical liberal arts curriculum was married to the agricultural training program. In 1953, under the presidency of Milton S. Eisenhower—the brother of former US Army Supreme Commander and then–US President, Dwight D. Eisenhower—the college was upgraded to Pennsylvania State University. With 23 campuses statewide...

In 1931, a Biological-Pedagogical Institute (later, the Institute of Natural Sciences) was established in the city of Tel Aviv in British Mandatory Palestine. Four years later, in 1935, a second institute—the School of Law and Economics—opened there, as well. In 1954, the Academic Institute of Jewish Studies was founded in the same city, now a part of the State of Israel. Finally, in 1956, the three aforementioned research institutes were combined—along with a new library and several new academic and administration buildings—to create the modern Tel Aviv University (TAU). Today, TAU comprises nine separate faculties, eight schools, and more than 130 research institutes and centers.

The University of Zurich is a public research university located in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. It is the largest university in Switzerland, with its 28,000 enrolled students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of theology, law, medicine which go back to 1525, and a new faculty of philosophy.

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