On Monday, the U.S. News & World Report released its 2022 ranking of best Global Universities, ranking the world’s best 1,750 universities on 13 indicators that measure their academic research performance and their global and regional reputations.
“Students can use these rankings to explore the higher education options that exist beyond their own countries’ borders and to compare key aspects of schools’ research missions,” U.S. News wrote.
This is the eighth annual ranking, which focuses specifically on schools’ academic research and reputation overall and not on separate undergraduate or graduate programs, and is meant to help compare institutions around the world.
On the list, the University of Chicago was the top university in Illinois, coming in at no. 15 globally. Northwestern University was no. 24 and Washington University in St. Louis was no. 31. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was no. 72 and University of Illinois Chicago was no. 227.
Southern Illinois University Carbondale was no. 1061 and Illinois State University was no. 1423. SIU Edwardsville and Illinois College were both unranked on the list.
The overall Best Global Universities ranking encompasses 1,750 top institutions, up from nearly 1,500 last year, and spread across more than 90 countries, up from 86 last year. More than 1,800 universities were narrowed down to the top 1,750 schools.
To create the pool of 1,849, U.S. News first included the top 250 universities in the results of Clarivate’s global reputation survey, described further below. Next, U.S. News added in any other institutions that had met the minimum threshold of at least 1,250 papers published in 2015 to 2019. This paper threshold is unchanged from last year. Those two criteria created the final 2022 ranking pool of 1,849 institutions from which the top-scoring 1,750 universities are ranked by U.S. News in the overall ranking.
As a result of these criteria, many stand-alone graduate schools, including Rockefeller University in New York and the University of California—San Francisco, were eligible to be ranked and were included in the ranking universe.
U.S. News’ report weighted “Global research reputation” and “Regional research reputation” more heavily than other factors, 12.5% of each school’s grade coming from each of those two indicators. “Number of publications that are among the 10% most cited” also received 12.5% of the grade. Three other indicators, including “publications,” made up 10% each.