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 Psychology,
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):
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 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 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.
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 ...
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...
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...
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.
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.
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 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 ...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
The University of Geneva is a public research university located in Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded in 1559 by John Calvin as a theological seminary. It remained focused on theology until the 17th century, when it became a center for enlightenment scholarship. Today, it is the third largest university in Switzerland by number of students.
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.
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 ...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The University of Zürich 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.
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 33,096 undergraduate and 9,872 graduate students. The university occupies near the coast of the Pacific Ocean, with the main campus resting on approximately .
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.
Clark University is a private research university in Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1887 with a large endowment from its namesake Jonas Gilman Clark, a prominent businessman, Clark was one of the first modern research universities in the United States. Originally an all-graduate institution, Clark's first undergraduates entered in 1902 and women were first enrolled in 1942.
The University of Iowa was founded in late February of 1847, as one of the very first legislative acts of the new state of Iowa after it was admitted to the union at the end of December of the previous year. Iowa City had been the old territorial capital city, and remained the capital for the first ten years of the new state’s existence. In 1857, the state capital was moved to Des Moines, but the Old Capitol Building remains one of the most prominent landmarks on the university’s main downtown campus. In line with its original charter, the University of Iowa has no campuses elsewhere in the st...
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.
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...
Allen J. Bard ranks among our Top Influential Chemists Today. Leonard Susskind ranks among our Top Influential Physicists Today.
Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) was founded in 1820. It is the flagship campus of the IU System. The university is divided into 16 schools. Together, they offer some 550 undergraduate and graduate degree programs and professional certificates, of which the business and communications programs are among the most sought-after. IUB’s online program offers more than 150 degree programs. IUB is associated with nine Nobel laureates, namely: Other distinguished IUB-connected individuals include the following: IUB is regionally accredited by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC).
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.
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 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 .
The University of Virginia (UVA) was very much the personal project of the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Virginia already had a venerable and distinguished university, the College of William & Mary, which is the second-oldest in the country—founded right after Harvard—and was Jefferson’s own alma mater. However, in Jefferson’s day, William & Mary continued to require its students to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, whereas Jefferson had become a deist—not an atheist, but not a Christian, either, and certainly not a friend to the C of E. ...
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 Buenos Aires is a public research university in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was established in 1821. It has educated 17 Argentine presidents, produced four of the country's five Nobel Prize laureates, and is responsible for approximately 40% of the country's research output.
The Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg is a public research university in Würzburg, Germany. It is one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in Germany, having been founded in 1402. The university initially had a brief run and was closed in 1415. It was reopened in 1582 on the initiative of Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn. Today, the university is named for Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn and Maximilian Joseph.
King's College London is a public research university located in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of King George IV and the Duke of Wellington. In 1836, King's became one of the two founding colleges of the University of London. It is one of the oldest university-level institutions in England. In the late 20th century, King's grew through a series of mergers, including with Queen Elizabeth College and Chelsea College of Science and Technology , the Institute of Psychiatry , the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospit...
The University of Göttingen was established under the auspices of Georg August, Elector of Hanover, who was at the same time King George II of Great Britain and Ireland. Born in Hanover in 1683, Georg August acceded to both the Electorship and the British throne upon his father George I’s death in 1727. The last of the British monarchs to be born outside of the UK, Georg August’s ties to his native region of Lower Saxony remained strong. As that Land (state or province) did not possess a university at the time of Georg August’s accession to his twin titles, the new Elector and King made it a p...
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.
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.
Ohio State University (OSU) was founded in 1870 as the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College. Three years later, in 1873, the new school opened its doors to a small group of 24 students. In 1878, the first class of just six students graduated. From these modest beginnings, the school grew rapidly. In recognition of the increasing demand for course offerings of wider scope, the same year that the first degrees were granted (1878) the Ohio state legislature changed the school’s name to its present form. Over time, OSU opened five regional campuses—in the towns of Newark, Lima, Marion, Mansfield, and Wooster.
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...
By rights, the University of Texas (known within Texas itself as “UT,” for short) ought to be 40 years older than it is. In 1839, the Republic of Texas officially set aside 40 acres of prime real estate in the center of the new country’s capital city, Austin, as the site for the campus of a national university. The Texas Congress also granted 288,000 acres of land, mainly in the western regions of the Republic, as a financial endowment for the future university. Much later, oil was discovered beneath a lot of that land. As a result, UT’s endowment is now worth a little more than $30 billion, making the school by far the wealthiest public university in the country.
The University of Arizona (UA) was founded in 1885, when Arizona was still a territory (it entered the Union in 1912). Because there were no high schools in the Arizona Territory, UA also offered college-preparatory classes for the first 23 years of its existence. Today, UA operates 19 separate schools and colleges—including the James E. Rogers College of Law and the University of Arizona College of Medicine (with campuses in both Tucson and Phoenix)—in addition to numerous institutes and centers. Among the latter, one of the most noteworthy is the cutting-edge Center for Consciousness Studies.
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...
