How the ranking works
Each university gets an overall score from two parts. 65% comes from measures that compare universities worldwide: research quality and strength, and alumni outcomes per student (company founders, wealthy graduates, Nobel and other laureates, internationally notable alumni and heads of state). 35% comes from measures that only compare universities within the same country: how selective admission is, how many admitted students enrol, and what graduates earn. Where a country has no official admissions or earnings data, that part is estimated from the university’s standing among its own country’s universities. Every rank is shown with the range it falls in across 2,000 simulations.
What this edition measures, and what comes next
| Measure | Status |
|---|---|
| Research quality and strength (open citation data) | Live |
| Alumni outcomes per student: founders, wealth, laureates, notable alumni, heads of state | Live |
| Admissions selectivity, yield and graduate earnings, within country | Live for the US, UK, mainland China, Australia and France; more countries in development |
| Student demand from verified cross-admit decisions (where admitted students actually enrol) | Planned; collection would start with the 2026–27 admissions cycle |
| Academic placement: where a university’s PhDs become professors | In development |
| Integrity screen: retractions, delisted journals, citation anomalies | Retraction counts shown as context on university pages; flags in development |
This ranking still says nothing directly about teaching quality, cost of living or student life. It measures who gets in, what graduates go on to do, and the research behind it.
Data and credit
Research indicators come from the CWTS Leiden Ranking Open Edition (Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University), which is built on OpenAlex; both are CC0. Admissions and earnings figures used in the ranking come from the US Department of Education (College Scorecard and IPEDS), Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, UCAS and the UK Department for Education (LEO), Australia’s QILT surveys, France’s Parcoursup, and published provincial gaokao admission statistics. Some university pages also show figures from Singapore’s Ministry of Education and Ireland’s CAO and CSO for context; these are not scored. Alumni outcomes come from PitchBook’s universities report, Altrata, a published study of billionaire alumni, the Rhodes Trust, and Wikidata (CC0). Retraction data comes from the Retraction Watch database, made openly available by Crossref, matched to universities through OpenAlex. We are independent and have no affiliation with any of these organisations, or with QS, THE or ShanghaiRanking.
Found an error?
Affiliation data isn’t perfect. If your university’s figures look wrong, the underlying OpenAlex records can be checked and corrected at the source. We will publish a corrections log with each edition, starting with the first correction received.