The Most Influential Schools in the World
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 …
List of the most influential schools in Economics,
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):
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 ...
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the University of London. Founded in 1895 by Fabian Society members Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw, LSE joined the University of London in 1900 and established its first degree courses under the auspices of the university in 1901. LSE began awarding its degrees in its own name in 2008, prior to which it awarded degrees of the University of London. It became a university in its own right within the University of London in 2022.
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.
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.
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...
The University of California, Berkeley , is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. It was established in 1868 as the University of California and is the state's first land-grant university and the founding campus of the University of California system. Berkeley has been regarded to be among the top universities in the world.
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.
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.
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.
Paris Sciences et Lettres University is a public research university based in Paris, France. It was established in 2010 and formally created as a university in 2019. It is a collegiate university with 11 constituent schools, with the oldest founded in 1530. PSL is located in central Paris, with its main sites in the Latin Quarter, at the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève campus, at the Jourdan campus, at Porte Dauphine, and at Carré Richelieu.
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.
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...
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...
The University of Tokyo is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 by the merger of several pre-westernisation era institutions such as Shoheizaka Institute and Kaiseijo, it was the nation's first modern university.
Paris Cité University is a public research university located in Paris, France. It was created by decree on 20 March 2019, resulting from the merger of Paris Descartes and Paris Diderot universities, established following the division of the University of Paris in 1970. It was originally established as the University of Paris , but was renamed by decree in March 2022 to its current name. The university headquarter is located in the 6th arrondissement at boulevard Saint-Germain. Among the best universities worldwide, in 2021 it was ranked 14th among young universities according to the Times ...
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 ...
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 Stockholm School of Economics is a private business school located in city district Vasastaden in the central part of Stockholm, Sweden. SSE offers BSc, MSc and MBA programs, along with PhD- and Executive education programs.
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.
In 1900, the Scottish-born industrialist and philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, donated the funds to establish a vocational college called the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, the Technical Schools’ name was changed to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT). Carnegie based CIT in Pittsburgh, where he had worked as a messenger boy for the Ohio Telegraph Company not long after arriving with his family in the US. By the turn of the twentieth century, that thriving industrial city had become the main base of operations for Carnegie’s vast steel factories. CIT’s site was adjacent to that of the campus of the University of Pittsburgh.
The University of Bonn, officially the Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn , is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the on 18 October 1818 by Frederick William III, as the linear successor of the which was founded in 1777. The University of Bonn offers many undergraduate and graduate programs in a range of subjects and has 544 professors. The University of Bonn is a member of the German U15 association of major research-intensive universities in Germany and has the title of "University of Excellence" ...
The founding of Northwestern University was spearheaded by the physician and politician John Evans, for whom the town of Evanston, Illinois, is named. The school is a private institution whose campus lies along Lake Michigan, just north of Chicago. Northwestern was originally intended to serve the needs of the geographical area corresponding to the former Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and eastern Minnesota)—hence the school’s name. The university is particularly renowned for its many distinguished professional schools, including the: Northwestern is also ho...
Peking University is a national public comprehensive university in Beijing, China. The university is affiliated with and sponsored by the Ministry of Education of China. It is part of C9 League, Double First Class University Plan, former Project 985, and former Project 211.
Bocconi University is a private university in Milan, Italy. Bocconi provides education in the fields of economics, finance, law, management, political science, public administration and computer science. SDA Bocconi, the university's graduate business school, offers MBA, Executive MBA, and DBA programs.
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 ...
This university has a fascinating pedigree. It was originally founded by Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm III, in consultation with three great German Enlightenment thinkers: the philologist and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, the philosopher J.G. Fichte, and the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Originally known simply as the University of Berlin, for most of its existence up until the aftermath of World War II, it was officially known as the Friedrich Wilhelm University. The site of the university lay in the central, Mitte neighborhood of the city, and in the aftermath of the war it unfortunately found itself just inside the Soviet sector—and thus, after 1961, just east of the Berlin Wall.
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the California State Normal School . It 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 ten-campus University of California system after the University of California, Berkeley.
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 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.
University College London, which operates as UCL, is a public research university in London, England. 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.
Rutgers University’s full official name is Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Rutgers traces its roots to Queen’s College, which was founded in 1766, making it the thirteenth-oldest university in the US. In 1825, Revolutionary War hero and philanthropist Henry Rutgers made a large financial contribution to the school, which in turn changed its name to Rutgers College. Rutgers College was upgraded to full university status in 1924, and in 1945 Rutgers was officially designated The State University of New Jersey. Today, Rutgers comprises three main campuses (New Brunswick-Piscataway—t...
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Sciences Po
The Paris Institute of Political Studies , also known as Sciences Po or Sciences Po Paris, is a public research university located in Paris, France, that holds the status of grande école and . The institute has decentralized campuses in Dijon, Le Havre, Menton, Nancy, Poitiers and Reims, each with their own academic program focused on a geopolitical part of the world. Sciences Po historically specialized in political science and history, then it progressively started to expand to other social sciences such as economics, law and sociology.
Stockholm University is a public research university in Stockholm, Sweden, founded as a college in 1878, with university status since 1960. With over 33,000 students at four different faculties: law, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, it is one of the largest universities in Scandinavia.
George Mason University (GMU) was founded in 1949 as the Northern Virginia University Center of the University of Virginia. The school was originally located in Arlington, Virginia, a suburban town just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. In 1956, the Northern Virginia University Center was upgraded to University College of the University of Virginia; at the same time, the school moved to the nearby town of Bailey’s Crossroads. In 1959, University College changed its name to George Mason College of the University of Virginia. George Mason (1725–1792) was a Virginia delegate to the US Constitutional Convention in 1787.
Federal University of Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées is the association of universities and higher education institutions for institutions of higher education and research in the French region of Midi-Pyrénées . On January 1, 2023, it was renamed as the University of Toulouse.
Goethe University Frankfurt is a public research university located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It was founded in 1914 as a citizens' university, which means it was founded and funded by the wealthy and active liberal citizenry of Frankfurt. The original name in German was Universität Frankfurt am Main. In 1932, the university's name was extended in honour of one of the most famous native sons of Frankfurt, the poet, philosopher and writer/dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The university currently has around 45,000 students, distributed across four major campuses within the city.
The University of Oslo is a public research university located in Oslo, Norway. It is the oldest university in Norway. Originally named the Royal Frederick University, the university was established in 1811 as the de facto Norwegian continuation of Denmark-Norway's common university, the University of Copenhagen, with which it shares many traditions. It was named for King Frederick VI of Denmark and Norway, and received its current name in 1939. The university was commonly nicknamed "The Royal Frederick's" before the name change, and informally also referred to simply as Universitetet .
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.
Waseda University , abbreviated as Waseda or Sōdai, is a private research university in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Founded in 1882 as the Tōkyō Professional School by the former Prime Minister of Japan, Ōkuma Shigenobu, the school was formally renamed Waseda University in 1902.
Kyoto University, or KyotoU, is a national research university located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded in 1897, it is one of the former Imperial Universities and the second oldest university in Japan. Founded upon the principles of its words, “freedom of academic culture”, KyotoU is currently composed of three campuses with ten Faculties, eighteen Graduate Schools, thirteen Research Institutes, and twenty-two Research and Educational Centers. The Kyoto University Library, boasting over 7 million volumes, is Japan's second-largest academic library. Furthermore, KyotoU was one of the first three Design...
Tsinghua University was founded in 1911 as Tsinghua College. In the modern Pinyin transliteration system, the name would be written as “Qinghua”; however, the university retains the older spelling for official purposes. Tsinghua University was built on the site of the former imperial gardens maintained by the Ming and Qing Dynasties.During the Qing Dynasty’s tumultuous last years, the Boxer Rebellion broke out in 1899. The rebellion targeted the many foreign embassies and private companies that had been occupying parts of China for decades, as well as Chinese Christians and others. After the b...
The University of Cologne is a university in Cologne, Germany. It was established in the year 1388, the sixth university to be established in Central Europe. It closed in 1798 before being re-established in 1919. It is now one of the largest universities in Germany with more than 50,000 students. The University of Cologne is a member of the German U15 association of major research-intensive universities and was a university of excellence as part of the German Universities Excellence Initiative from 2012 to 2019. It is constantly ranked among top 20 German universities in the world rankings.
The present-day University of Munich traces its roots to a fifteenth-century institution founded in the town of Ingolstadt by Duke Ludwig IX of Bavaria-Landshut. The school was moved to the town of Landshut in 1800 by King Maximilian I of Bavaria, when Ingolstadt was threatened by invading French armies during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1802, it was given its present official name of “Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU)” in recognition of its first and second founding fathers. Finally, in 1826 another Ludwig—King Ludwig I of Bavaria—relocated the university yet again to its present location in the Bavarian capital city of Munich.
Keio University, abbreviated as Keio or Keidai, is a private research university located in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It is the oldest institute of western higher education in Japan. Its founder, Fukuzawa Yukichi, originally established it as a school for Western studies in 1858 in Edo.
Paris Diderot University, also known as Paris 7 , was a French university located in Paris, France. It was one of the inheritors of the historic University of Paris, which was split into 13 universities in 1970. Paris Diderot merged with Paris Descartes University in 2019 to form the University of Paris, which was later renamed Paris Cité University.
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.
Brown began life as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (officially) or Rhode Island College (unofficially). It is the twelfth-oldest institution of higher learning in the US. Rhode Island College was established in the town of Warren on the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay, a few miles south of the city of Providence. The school moved to Providence in 1770. The College was established by a group of Baptist ministers (that being the religious affiliation of Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams), working in close cooperation with Quakers (Friends), Congregationalists, and Anglicans (Episcopalians).
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.
UCLouvain or Université catholique de Louvain is Belgium's largest French-speaking university. It is located in Louvain-la-Neuve, which was expressly built to house the university, and Brussels, Charleroi, Mons, Tournai and Namur. Since September 2018, the university has used the branding UCLouvain, replacing the acronym UCL, following a merger with Saint-Louis University, Brussels.
