23. London School of Economics and Political Science (UK)

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is one of the foremost social science universities in the world. Its research and teaching span the full breadth of the social sciences, from economics, politics and law to sociology, anthropology, accounting and finance. Founded in 1895 by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the school has an outstanding reputation for academic excellence. 16 Nobel prize winners have been LSE staff or alumni.

LSE frequently appears in the top reaches of international and national league tables, and has been ranked London’s top university for three years in a row. Set up to improve society and to "understand the causes of things”, LSE is delivering a five point plan to ensure a continued focus on excellence, inclusivity and achievement.

LSE offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the social sciences. From its location in the heart of London, the school links communities across the world, from formal academic partnerships to advisory work with governments and international organizations.

22. Carnegie Mellon University (US)

Carnegie Mellon University is a top-tier global research university and has been a birthplace of innovation since its founding in 1900. Our award-winning faculty is renowned for working closely with students to solve major scientific, technological and societal challenges. Our students are recruited by some of the world’s most successful and innovative companies, from Broadway to Bangalore. Carnegie Mellon puts a strong emphasis on making things, from art to robots. Carnegie Mellon alumni, students, faculty and staff are also encouraged to advance their novel ideas from the laboratory to the marketplace. The university ranked first among US institutions in the number of start-up companies created per research dollar spent between 2008 and 2012, according to the Association of University Technology Managers. In addition to US locations in Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley, Carnegie Mellon has a campus in Doha, Qatar, and offers degree programmes in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Latin America. Carnegie Mellon is one of only 25 universities that were invited to be a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global University Leaders Forum. More than 98,000 Carnegie Mellon alumni around the world embody founder Andrew Carnegie’s famous words, “My heart is in the work.”

21. University of Michigan (US)

A public university founded in 1817, the University of Michigan had a rustic beginning. At its campus in Ann Arbor, west of Detroit, cows owned by the faculty once grazed, and as late as 1845, wheat was grown on site as part of a janitor’s remuneration.

By 1866, the university had become the largest in the country. Now, the University of Michiganis one of the biggest research universities in the United States. It boasts alumni including Gerald Ford, former US president; Larry Page, co-founder of Google; and actor James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader. 

The university’s sporting tradition began in 1865, and its sports teams, collectively known as the Michigan Wolverines, have won more than 50 national championships in 12 sports. Why the wolverine became the university’s mascot is a mystery, as although the nickname caught on in the middle of the 19th century, the first verified sighting of the animal in Michigan state did not occur until 2004.

Michigan’s mission is to serve the people of Michigan and the world through “preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future”. It offers 250 undergraduate majors, 100 doctoral and 200 master’s programmes, as well as more than 1,400 student clubs.

The university has no shortage of bizarre traditions. On campus sits “The Cube”, a huge black object so finely balanced on one corner that students can spin it around despite its great weight. One myth is that the president gives it a push each morning in order to keep the campus running smoothly.

When students first arrive at Michigan they walk through a campus fountain to make them an “official wolverine”. After graduation, they walk the other way through the water, signifying their departure to join the professional world. And don’t step on the brass “M” at the centre of the campus, or exam failure awaits.

20. Duke University (US)

Duke University, located in the US state of North Carolina, is one of the wealthiest private universities in America and a top producer of international scholars.

It was founded in 1838 as Trinity College but became known as Duke University only in 1924 after the Duke Endowment was established. The university describes itself as younger than most other prestigious research universities in the country.

The original campus was rebuilt in Georgian architecture as is now known as East Campus, after the 1930 addition of West Campus, Gothic in style and home to the impressive Duke Chapel tower.

There are 10 schools and colleges; the oldest is Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, founded in 1859, and the youngest is the Nicholas School of the Environment, established just 25 years ago.

About 95 per cent of all students graduate within four years of enrolling. In the 2015 entry class, the most popular majors were public policy, economics, biology, biomedical engineering and psychology.

Sports and performance art both thrive at Duke University, which competes in athletics and basketball, and hosts more than 60 art events a year.

In 2014, Duke Kunshan University opened in China, with the aim of integrating liberal arts education with Chinese tradition. Duke also has a partnership with the National University of Singapore to collaborate on a joint medical programme, which took its first students in 2007.

Overall, the university is one of the most competitive to get into. For the “Class of 2019” cohort, only 11.4 per cent of the applicants received a place.

Unusually, the university requires undergraduates to live on campus for the first three years. More than 75 per cent of the students also pursue volunteering opportunities, supporting the university’s mission, “knowledge in service to society”.

The most notable alumnus is Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States. He graduated from Duke University with a law degree in 1937. Duke alumni also head many Fortune 500 companies including Apple, Cisco Systems, JPMorgan Chase and PepsiCo.

Melinda Gates, who co-founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with her husband, also attended the university.

The alumni community also includes prominent novelists such as William Styron, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner and also wrote Sophie’s Choice, and Anne Tyler, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons.

The university has an extensive private research library network, with three libraries on its West Campus, two on its East Campus, a library at the marine laboratory and separate libraries for business, divinity, law and medicine.

19. University of Toronto (US)

Description

A message from the University of Toronto

Established in 1827, the University of Toronto is a world-renowned community of 85,000 students and 13,000 faculty members, located in one of the world’s most vibrant and multicultural cities.

The student experience

The University of Toronto attracts students of the highest calibre from around the world. Small-group seminars and tutorials, combined with large lectures and online support, give students the opportunity to develop a spectrum of skills and knowledge. Students are attracted to U of T by the opportunity to work closely with renowned professors and to engage in research right from the beginning of their academic careers.

The University of Toronto also offers a vibrant extra-curricular student experience, with more than 800 clubs and student-run organizations. And just outside the lecture halls lies a world-class city renowned for its extraordinary variety of activities and its multicultural diversity.

Research and innovation

The University of Toronto has a long history of innovation and research. It’s where Banting and Best first used insulin to treat diabetes, where Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that the medium is the message, where Frederick Teasdale and his colleagues developed Pablum and where Ernest McCulloch and James Till discovered stem cells. And the spirit of discovery lives on in a new generation of researchers making breakthroughs in such fields as computer speech recognition, solar energy, quantum cryptography, transportation and medicine. Today, our research community spans three campuses and nine partner hospitals, with annual research income totaling $1.2 billion. U of T researchers publish more articles than peers at any university except Harvard. U of T consistently ranks alongside the top five U.S. universities in the world in articles cited and is one of the top three single North American institutions in number of start-up companies created. 

University of Toronto alumni

U of T’s 500,000 alumni occupy leadership roles in more than 150 countries and in every sphere of human activity. Their ranks have included Lester Pearson, Norman Bethune, Margaret Atwood, Roberta Bondar, Julie Payette, David Cronenberg, Malcolm Gladwell and Craig Kielburger – prime ministers and poets, comedians and cinematographers, Nobel Prize laureates, humanitarians, astronauts and entrepreneurs.

18. Cornell University (US)

Founded in 1865, Cornell University is a private Ivy League university with a mission to “discover, preserve, and disseminate knowledge”. A federal land grant university with a private endowment, Cornell has six locations across the world. Its main campus in Ithaca, New York State, covers 2,300 acres of the Finger Lakes region, and is so extensive that students can go hiking without even leaving the university.

It also has a graduate school of medical sciences in New York city, a base in Rome where students study art, architecture and urban planning, a centre for students to gain work experience in Washington DC, and a medical college at Education City in Doha, Qatar.

Cornell counts 45 Nobel laureates among its faculty members and alumni. Other notable alumni include Tsai Ing-wen, the president-elect of Taiwan, and Huey Lewis, frontman for the band Huey Lewis and the News.

The university boasts a number of unique student traditions, such as Dragon Day, when, in late March each year, a huge dragon is paraded across campus by first-year students of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. Heckled by rival students from the College of Engineering, the dragon is then burned in Cornell’s Arts Quad. This ritual can be traced back to high jinx of the architecture class of 1901, and was formalised by students in the 1950s.

Another tradition that has continued since Cornell’s opening in 1868 is the Cornell Chimes – daily bell performances by “chimesmasters”. These performers are selected by rigorous, 10 week long competitions, although chimesmasters do not need to have any previous experience playing the chimes. After climbing the 161 steps to the top of the historic McGraw Tower where the bells are housed, chimesmasters play from a collection of more than 2,500 songs, from musicians ranging from Schubert to the Beatles.

17. University of Pennsylvania (US)

Given its status as one of the nine original Colonial Colleges – institutions established before the US became a sovereign nation after the American Revolution – and a founding member of the Association of American Universities, it is no surprise the University of Pennsylvania(Penn) claims to be the first fully fledged (multi-faculty) “university” in the USA.

Though Penn’s origins date back to 1740, it was until 1749 when Benjamin Franklin published his famous essay, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth, circulated it among Philadelphia’s prominent citizens, and organized 24 trustees to form an institution of higher education based on his proposals. It was 30 years later when Penn was granted university status. Since then, Penn has expanded into a sprawling 302-acre campus with 200 buildings. It boasts many notable “first” landmarks on campus including the country’s first student union, double-decker college football stadium, and the world’s first collegiate business school – The Wharton School.

Penn’s prowess is not restricted to just infrastructure. The university has an exhaustive list of notable alumni from all walks of life. Penn has affiliations with over 25 Nobel Laureates including physicist Raymond Davis Jr and economist Lawrence Klein, and has accounted for numerous heads of state. Ninth president of the USA, William Henry Harrison, trod the boards at Penn in 1791, while Nnamdi Azikiwe – former president of Nigeria – and Kwame Nkrumah – former prime minister and president of Ghana – both gained multiple degrees from the institution. Noted modernist poets and friends Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams are among the literary luminaries from the institution.