8 MA Universities Among Best In World, New List Says

MASSACHUSETTS — Eight Massachusetts universities are among the 500 best in the world, according to a recent ranking from Time designed to help students understand where they’re most likely to get degrees that help them achieve extraordinary success after graduation.

Massachusetts universities cited by Time and their rank in the world are:

4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
6. Harvard University, Cambridge
41. Boston University, Boston
58. Tufts University, Medford
210. University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst
246. Boston College, Chestnut Hill
362. Northeastern University, Boston
415. Babson College, Wellesley

The higher education debate often falsely pits diversity against meritocracy, suggesting universities must choose between student identity and quality, but the core issue may be wealth’s role in admissions, Time said. The real question is how to design admissions policies that are both more meritocratic and increase socioeconomic diversity, the news outlet said.

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Time said the tension is reflected in its new ranking of the World’s Top Universities, which emphasizes the extent to which students achieve extraordinary success — for example, in patenting innovations or rising to leadership roles in business. But the analysis also reveals what Time called “an uncomfortable reality”: These top universities are primarily accessible to children from wealthy families in most countries, limiting their socioeconomic diversity.

Time said its research using big data to study the outcomes of millions of college students over time underscored that in the United States. While fewer than 1 percent of Americans attend the 12 “Ivy-Plus” colleges (the eight Ivies, plus Stanford, MIT, Duke and UChicago), these alumni account for more than 13 percent of the top 0.1 percent of earners, a quarter of U.S. senators, half of Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of recent Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century.

“These institutions don’t merely select talented students but directly change their life trajectories,” Time said. “Comparing waitlisted students who were accepted vs. rejected from these institutions essentially by chance, we find that those who attend an Ivy-Plus college are far more likely to reach the top 1 percent of the income distribution, work at prestigious firms, and achieve success in many other dimensions. Selective colleges have extraordinary influence.”

The top 20 universities worldwide on Time’s list are:

1. University of Oxford, United Kingdom (public)
2. Yale University, United States (private)
3. Stanford University, United States (private)
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States (private)
5. The University of Chicago, United States (private)
6. Harvard University, United States (private)
7. University of Cambridge, United Kingdom (public)
8. Imperial College of London, United Kingdom (public)
9. University of Michigan, United States (public)
10. University of Pennsylvania, United States (private)
11. Princeton University, United States (private)
12. Johns Hopkins University, United States (private)
13. California Institute of Technology, United States (private)
14. Duke University, United States (private)
15. Cornell University, United States (private)
16. The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom (public)
17. The University of Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region, China (public)
18. ETH Zurich, Switzerland (public)
19. University of Zurich, Switzerland (public)
20. University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States (public)

Related: Forbes Names ‘New Ivies’: Notes Employers More Likely To Hire Their Grads