Harvard University is almost universally acclaimed as the world’s most prestigious university. There is little doubt that its towering reputation is well earned.
View ProfileAn institution of higher education named University College London (UCL) was founded in the UK’s largest metropolis and capital city in 1826. A mere three years later, in 1829, a second, similar institution named King’s College London (KCL) opened its doors. Then, a mere decade after the founding of UCL, a third institution known simply as University of London (UL) was founded in 1836 by the merger of UCL and KCL.
View ProfileFounded 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).
View ProfileYale 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.
View ProfileThe 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.
View ProfileColumbia 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.
View ProfileWheaton College is an Evangelical liberal arts college and graduate school in Wheaton, Illinois. It was founded by evangelical abolitionists in 1860. Wheaton College was a stop on the Underground Railroad and graduated one of Illinois' first black college graduates.
View ProfileDuke 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.
View ProfileThe University of Notre Dame (ND) was founded in 1842 by Edward Sorin, a Catholic priest of the religious order of the Congregation of Holy Cross (Congregatio a Sancta Cruce—CSC). ND was originally a primary and secondary school. Two years later, in 1844, the school received its college charter from the General Assembly of Indiana (which had been a state since 1816). It awarded its first degree in 1849.
View ProfilePrinceton Theological Seminary, officially The Theological Seminary of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, is a private school of theology in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1812 under the auspices of Archibald Alexander, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church , and the College of New Jersey , it is the second-oldest seminary in the United States. It is also the largest of ten seminaries associated with the Presbyterian Church.
View ProfileThe 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).
View ProfileAlthough 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 inc...
View ProfileIn 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).
View ProfileFuller Theological Seminary is an Evangelical Christian seminary in Pasadena, California, with regional campuseses in the western United States.History Fuller Theological Seminary was founded in 1947 by Charles E. Fuller, a radio evangelist known for his Old Fashioned Revival Hour show, and Harold Ockenga, the pastor of Park Street Church in Boston. The seminary's founders sought to reform fundamentalism's separatist and sometimes anti-intellectual stance during the 1920s–1940s. Fuller envisaged that the seminary would become "a Caltech of the evangelical world."
View ProfileThe 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 31,000 undergraduate and 12,000 graduate students. Berkeley is ranked among the world's top universities by major educational publications.
View ProfileDurham University is a public, research university established by an act of Parliament in 1832. It received its royal charter five years later, in 1837.
View ProfileWestminster Theological Seminary is a Reformed Christian seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania which was founded by faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary in 1929 after Princeton chose to take a liberal direction.
View ProfileBoston College (BC) was founded in 1863 by the Jesuit religious order. BC is organized into nine colleges and schools. The undergraduate division of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences alone offers more than 100 academic programs.
View ProfileEmory University is a private, research university originally founded in Oxford, Georgia, in 1836 by the Methodist Episcopal Church as Emory College.
View ProfileStanford 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 Iv...
View ProfileThe Catholic University of America was founded in 1887 by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Catholic University is organized into 12 schools, which collectively offer some 250 bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs. In addition, the university is home to 22 research centers, institutes, and laboratories.
View ProfileTrinity Evangelical Divinity School is an academic divinity school founded in 1897 and located in the northern Chicago suburb of Deerfield, Illinois. It is part of and located on the main campus of Trinity International University. TEDS is one of the largest seminaries in the world, enrolling more than 1,200 graduate students in professional and academic programs, including more than 150 in its Ph.D. programs. The most popular degree at the school, the Master of Divinity degree, prepares pastors, educators, and missionaries for many kinds of service. The school also offers a range of more fo...
View ProfileGeorgetown University is a Catholic institution of higher learning that was founded in 1789 by John Carroll, Archbishop of Baltimore.
View ProfileThe University of Birmingham has a rather involved history. The oldest entity to which the modern university can trace its roots is the Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery, founded in 1825. This medical-training college was officially recognized by the crown in 1836, becoming the Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery, which developed into Queen’s College, Birmingham, in 1843.
View ProfileAs 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).
View ProfileThe 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.
View ProfileBiola University is a private evangelical Christian university in La Mirada, California. Founded in 1908 in Los Angeles, the university has over 150 programs of study in nine schools.History Biola University was founded in 1908 as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles by Lyman Stewart, president of the Union Oil Company of California ; Thomas C. Horton, a Presbyterian minister and Christian author; and Augustus B. Prichard, also a Presbyterian minister.
View ProfileBoston University (universally known as “BU”) traces its roots to a Methodist Church training college, the Newbury Biblical Institute, founded in Newbury, Vermont, by a group of Boston-based Methodist ministers and elders. Ten years later, in 1849, the school was transferred to the much larger town (and state capital) of Concord, New Hampshire, where it operated as the Concord Biblical Institute for 20 more years. Finally, in 1869, it moved again, this time to Boston itself, under the new name of the Boston Theological Institute.
View ProfileThe National University of Singapore (NUS) was founded in 1905 as the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States Government Medical School, in what was then the British-controlled Straits Settlements colony.
View ProfileThe University of Aberdeen is a public research university in Aberdeen, Scotland. It is an ancient university founded in 1495 when William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen and Chancellor of Scotland, petitioned Pope Alexander VI on behalf of James IV, King of Scots to establish King's College, making it Scotland's third-oldest university and the fifth-oldest in the English-speaking world. Aberdeen is consistently ranked among the top 200 universities in the world and is ranked within the top 20 universities in the United Kingdom according to The Guardian.
View ProfileThe 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.
View ProfileYeshiva University is a private research university with four campuses in New York City. The university's undergraduate schools—Yeshiva College, Stern College for Women, Katz School of Science and Health, and Syms School of Business—offer a dual curriculum inspired by Modern–Centrist–Orthodox Judaism's hashkafa of Torah Umadda , combining academic education with the study of the Torah. While the majority of students at the university are of the Jewish faith, many students, especially at the Cardozo School of Law, the School of Business, and the Graduate School of Psychology, are not Jewish.
View ProfileThe 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).
View ProfileFordham University was founded in 1841 by the Jesuit religious order. It still retains its Catholic affiliation.
View ProfileSorbonne University is a public research university in Paris, France, established in 2018 by the merger of Paris-Sorbonne University and Pierre et Marie Curie University, along with smaller institutions. The university's current legal status was introduced in 2018 but the legacy of the institution reaches back to 1257 when Sorbonne College was established by Robert de Sorbon as part of the medieval University of Paris. It is one of the most prestigious universities in Europe and the world, as of 2021, Sorbonne University's alumni and professors have won 33 Nobel Prizes, 6 Fields Medals and on...
View ProfileThe Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is a Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. It is the oldest of the six seminaries affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention . The seminary was founded in 1859 in Greenville, South Carolina, where it was at first housed on the campus of Furman University. After being closed during the Civil War, it moved in 1877 to a newly built campus in downtown Louisville and moved to its current location in 1926 in the Crescent Hill neighborhood. For more than fifty years Southern has been one of the world's largest theological seminaries, with...
View ProfileThe University of St Andrews is the oldest university in Scotland, and the third-oldest in the UK—and, thus, in the English-speaking world. The university has an interesting history.
View ProfileFounded by a decree (“papal bull”) issued by Pope Nicholas V, Glasgow is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world. Only Oxford and Cambridge (see above) and, in Scotland, St. Andrews University (founded in 1413) are older.
View ProfileUnion Theological Seminary in the City of New York is a non-denominational Christian seminary in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, New York City. It is affiliated with neighboring Columbia University. Since 1928, the seminary has served as Columbia's constituent faculty of theology. In 1964, UTS also established an affiliation with the neighboring Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
View ProfileMcGill 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.
View ProfileDallas Theological Seminary is an evangelical theological seminary in Dallas, Texas. It is known for popularizing Free grace theology and the theological system Dispensationalism. DTS has campuses in Dallas, Houston, and Washington, D.C., as well as extension campuses in Atlanta, Austin, San Antonio, Nashville, Northwest Arkansas, Europe, Guatemala, and Australasia and a multi-lingual online education program.
View ProfileBaylor University is a private Baptist research university in Waco, Texas. Baylor was chartered in 1845 by the last Congress of the Republic of Texas. Baylor is the oldest continuously operating university in Texas and one of the first educational institutions west of the Mississippi River in the United States. Located on the banks of the Brazos River next to I-35, between the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex and Austin, the university's campus is the largest Baptist university in the world. As of fall, 2020, Baylor had a total enrollment of 19,522 . It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universiti
View ProfileBrandeis University was founded in suburban Boston in 1948. Its founders intended to provide a top-rank research university that would be friendly to Jewish students and faculty—at a time when the American Ivy League schools all restricted the number of their Jewish students according to a strict quota system.
View ProfileThe 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 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, judges of the Federal Constitutional Co
View ProfileThe Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy is one of the Roman Colleges of the Catholic Church. The academy is dedicated to training priests to serve in the diplomatic corps and the Secretariat of State of the Holy See.
View ProfileThe University of North Carolina (UNC) system is a large network of 16 public universities with a total student enrollment of around 240,000 souls. The oldest member of the UNC system is the flagship campus in the small, centrally located town of Chapel Hill.
View ProfileThe University of Nottingham traces its ultimate roots to a private adult-education and teacher-training (normal) school founded in that Midlands city in 1798. In 1873, the University of Cambridge began offering college extension courses in connection with the normal school. However, the official founding of the present university is usually taken to coincide with the establishment of University College Nottingham, in 1881.
View ProfileWith more than 40,000 students, Manchester is the largest single-site university in the United Kingdom. While it traces its roots back to the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute founded in 1824, the present university was formed by the merger of University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) and Victoria University of Manchester in 2004.
View ProfileThe wave of expansion of Homo sapiens out of its African birthplace reached the continent of Australia around 40,000 years ago, or more. However, the first visit of Europeans to the land down under did not occur until 1606, when the Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon made landfall at what is now the town of Weipa on the western shore of the Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland.
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