11 Illinois Colleges Among Best In World: U.S. News

U.S. News & World Report has ranked 11 Illinois universities among the best on Earth. The 5th annual rankings were released on Tuesday and compared 1,250 schools across 75 countries. The United States dominated the list with 227 schools making the list.

University of Chicago was ranked the best college in Illinois with an overall ranking of 14. Here’s the complete breakdown for our state:

University of Chicago
Ranking: 14

Northwestern University
Ranking: 24

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Ranking: 54

University of Illinois Chicago
Ranking: 204

Rush University
Ranking: 414

Illinois Institute of Technology
Ranking: 641

Loyola University Chicago
Ranking: 644

Northern Illinois University
Ranking: 656

Southern Illinois University
Ranking: 890

Illinois State University
Ranking: 1,139

DePaul University
Ranking: 1,221

The United States boasted four of the top five spots in the global rankings — Harvard University, as you might have guessed, ranked No. 1 — and eight of the top 10. Massachusetts was home to the top two in the world while California boasted three of the top six universities.

Across the 22 subject rankings, which evaluate the humanities, applied sciences, mathematics and more, Harvard ranked No. 1 in 10 subjects — more than any other school, the news outlet said.

Here are the country’s top 10 universities and their global ranks:

1. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (1)
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (2)
3. Stanford University, Stanford, CA (3)
4. University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA (4)
5. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA (6)
6. Columbia University, New York, NY (8)
7. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ (9)
8. University of Washington, Seattle, WA (10)
9. Yale University, New Haven, CT (11)
10. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD (12)

China had the second most institutions on the list with 130, followed by the United Kingdom with 78, Japan with 67, and Germany with 62. Three of the top 10 schools in engineering and four of the top 10 schools in computer science were based in China, including Tsinghua University, which ranked No. 1 in both subjects.

However, the U.S. performed among the best in four subjects: neuroscience and behavior, economics and business, computer science and engineering.

“When we first started publishing Best Global Universities, the rankings evaluated 500 schools in 11 countries,” Robert Morse, chief data strategist at U.S. News, said in a release. “Since then, we’ve added 750 schools and have expanded to 75 nations. One thing has remained the same: Schools that prioritize quality academic research remain at the top of the rankings.”

A pool of 1,372 universities were evaluated for the global rankings, which focused on academic research and reputation rather than their separate undergraduate or graduate programs. Thirteen separate ranking factors were used to determine the rankings, specifically: indicators that measure a school’s reputation and so-called bibliometric indicators that measure academic research performance, including citations and publications.

Click here to read more on the methodology.

Patch national staffer Dan Hampton contributed to this report.

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