ARWU University Ranking 2025 (Shanghai Ranking) and Our Memo

Key Findings

1. Publisher & calendar

Publisher: ShanghaiRanking Consultancy (Shanghai). ARWU was first published in June 2003 by the Center for World-Class Universities (CWCU), Graduate School of Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University; since 2009 ShanghaiRanking Consultancy — described on its own site as “a fully independent organization … not legally subordinated to any universities or government agencies” — has been the sole publisher and copyright holder. The company also publishes GRAS, the Global Ranking of Sport Science Schools, and the Best Chinese Universities Ranking.
ARWU 2025 release: 15 August 2025. GRAS 2025 release: 18 November 2025 (confirmed by Penn State, University of Saskatchewan and University of Jyväskylä press notices; ShanghaiRanking’s own article URL bears the “2025_11” code).
Scale: ARWU 2025 scrutinised more than 2,500 universities and published the top 1,000. GRAS 2025 evaluated more than 3,000 universities and published roughly 20,000 subject entries from approximately 2,000 institutions across 92 countries and regions (China Daily coverage of the press release; ShanghaiRanking’s site rounds this to “some 100 countries”).
Data partner: Clarivate (Highly Cited Researchers, InCites, Web of Science / SCIE & SSCI, Journal Citation Reports).

2. ARWU 2025 main ranking — methodology (unchanged from prior years)

The ranking is built from six objective indicators, with the highest-scoring university on each indicator scaled to 100 and others as a percentage of that top score.

Criterion	Indicator	Code	Weight
Quality of Education	Alumni winning Nobel Prizes & Fields Medals	Alumni	10%
Quality of Faculty	Staff winning Nobel Prizes & Fields Medals	Award	20%
Quality of Faculty	Highly Cited Researchers (Clarivate, Nov 2024 list)	HiCi	20%
Research Output	Articles in Nature & Science (2020–2024)	N&S	20%
Research Output	Articles in SCIE + SSCI (2024)	PUB	20%
Per Capita Performance	Weighted score ÷ FTE academic staff	PCP	10%

For humanities/social-science specialist institutions (e.g., LSE), N&S is excluded and its weight is redistributed. Alumni and Award weights decay by decade (100% for the most recent decade, dropping 10 percentage points per earlier decade).

3. ARWU 2025 — Top 50 universities (with country and total score)

2025 Rank	2024 Rank	Institution	Country	Total Score
1	1	Harvard University	USA	100.0
2	2	Stanford University	USA	76.8
3	3	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	USA	71.2
4	4	University of Cambridge	UK	68.6
5	5	University of California, Berkeley	USA	61.8
6	6	University of Oxford	UK	61.0
7	7	Princeton University	USA	59.4
8	8	Columbia University	USA	55.8
9	8	California Institute of Technology (Caltech)	USA	55.5
10	10	University of Chicago	USA	54.2
11	11	Yale University	USA	53.6
12	12	Cornell University	USA	49.8
13	12	Paris-Saclay University	France	49.1
14	16	University College London (UCL)	UK	48.5
14	14	University of Pennsylvania	USA	48.5
16	15	UCLA	USA	48.0
17	18	University of Washington	USA	46.2
18	22	Tsinghua University	China	46.0
19	17	Johns Hopkins University	USA	45.5
20	18	UC San Diego	USA	45.3
21	20	UC San Francisco	USA	44.7
22	21	ETH Zurich	Switzerland	44.1
23	24	Peking University	China	42.5
24	27	Zhejiang University	China	42.0
25	26	University of Toronto	Canada	41.5
26	25	Imperial College London	UK	40.4
26	23	Washington University in St Louis	USA	40.4
28	31	New York University (NYU)	USA	38.9
29	29	Rockefeller University	USA	38.7
30	38	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	China	37.7
31	33	Northwestern University	USA	37.5
31	28	The University of Tokyo	Japan	37.5
33	30	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	USA	37.4
34	33	PSL University	France	37.3
35	32	University of Copenhagen	Denmark	37.2
36	36	University of Wisconsin–Madison	USA	36.4
37	40	The University of Edinburgh	UK	35.7
38	37	The University of Melbourne	Australia	35.5
39	35	UNC Chapel Hill	USA	35.0
40	42	University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)	China	34.9
41	50	Fudan University	China	34.5
42	43	LMU Munich (University of Munich)	Germany	34.4
43	41	Sorbonne University	France	34.3
44	55	EPFL (Swiss Fed Inst Tech – Lausanne)	Switzerland	34.1
45	47	Technical University of Munich	Germany	33.7
46	39	Duke University	USA	33.6
46	45	Kyoto University	Japan	33.6
46	52	The University of Manchester	UK	33.6
49	45	UT Austin	USA	33.4
50	43	Karolinska Institute	Sweden	32.9

4. Notable rank movements and entrants (ARWU 2025 vs 2024)

New entrants to the top 100: City University of Hong Kong (99th, up from 101-150) and Stockholm University (100th, up from 101-150). 25 new universities enter the top 500 and 39 enter the top 1,000.
Biggest top-50 climbers: Fudan (50 → 41, +9), EPFL (55 → 44, +11), Manchester (52 → 46, +6), Shanghai Jiao Tong (38 → 30, +8), Tsinghua (22 → 18, +4 — its first ever entry into the global top 20 and #1 in Asia).
Country distribution at the top: USA 37 in the top 100, Mainland China 13, UK 8, Germany 4 (LMU 42, TUM 45, Heidelberg 51 — just outside the top 50 — and Bonn 68), France 4 (Paris-Saclay 13, PSL 34, Sorbonne 43, Université Paris Cité 60).
Volume race: Mainland China now has 222 universities in the top 1,000 vs 183 for the US, although the US still dominates the elite tier. Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau combined account for 108 top-500 places vs 111 for the United States (British Council analysis of the official data).

5. GRAS 2025 — what it is, when it came out, and how its methodology differs

GRAS was first introduced in 2009 (then called “ARWU by Subject”) and renamed GRAS in 2016. GRAS 2025 was released on 18 November 2025 and ranks 57 subjects across five fields (Natural Sciences, Engineering, Life Sciences, Medical Sciences, Social Sciences). Two new subjects were added in 2025: Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Science & Engineering, taking the total from 55 in 2024 to 57.

GRAS uses a different, nine-indicator framework grouped into five categories, with weights varying by subject:

Category	Indicator	Code	What it measures
World-Class Faculty	International Academic Award Laureates	LAUREATE	Full-time staff (≤80 yrs old) who have won one of the 46 prestigious subject-specific awards identified via ShanghaiRanking’s Academic Excellence Survey (AES), 1981–2024.
World-Class Faculty	Highly Cited Researchers	HCR	Clarivate’s January 2025 HCR list, primary affiliations only.
World-Class Faculty	Chief Editors of International Journals	EDITOR	Editor-in-Chief (weight 200%) and Deputy Editor-in-Chief (100%) seats in SCIE/SSCI/A&HCI journals (JCR 2023; excluding Hindawi/MDPI/Frontiers and ESCI).
World-Class Faculty	International Academic Organization Leadership	LEADERSHIP	Faculty serving as President/VP/Secretary General etc. of 33 key international scholarly bodies (as of July 2025).
World-Class Output	Top Journal / Top Conference Papers	TJ	Papers in 175 top journals (or 26 top conferences for CS & AI), 2020–2024.
World-Class Output	International Academic Awards	AWARD	Cumulative wins of the 46 top awards, 1901–2024, with diminishing-weight decay (100% 2021–24, 75% 2011–20, etc.).
High-Quality Research	Q1 Journal Papers	Q1	Articles/reviews in Q1-impact-factor journals, 2020–2024 (InCites).
Research Impact	Category Normalised Citation Impact	CNCI	Field-, year- and document-type-normalised citation impact, 2020–2024 (InCites).
International Collaboration	International Collaborated Papers	IC	Share of papers with co-authors from ≥2 countries, 2020–2024 (InCites).

Scoring: each institution gets a square-root-transformed percentage of the top-scoring institution on each indicator, multiplied by the indicator weight; final scores are summed. Crucially, GRAS does NOT use Nobel/Fields counts and gives much higher weight to current research output, citation impact and faculty seniority than the main ARWU does.

6. GRAS 2025 — Computer Science & Engineering (Top 30)

Rank	Institution	Country	Total Score
1	MIT	USA	356.1
2	Tsinghua University	China	317.1
3	Stanford University	USA	295.2
4	UC Berkeley	USA	269.7
5	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	China	264.4
6	Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST)	Hong Kong, China	239.6
7	Princeton University	USA	232.3
8	Carnegie Mellon University	USA	230.4
9	Zhejiang University	China	227.0
10	Nanyang Technological University	Singapore	217.9
11	University of Science & Technology of China (USTC)	China	214.7
12	National University of Singapore	Singapore	214.5
13	The Chinese University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong, China	207.6
14	Peking University	China	205.1
15	Wuhan University	China	200.5
16	University of Electronic Science & Technology of China (UESTC)	China	198.9
17	Southeast University	China	196.6
18	University of Oxford	UK	196.3
19	Harvard University	USA	195.2
20	University of Toronto	Canada	194.2
21	Georgia Tech	USA	192.7
22	UT Austin	USA	191.6
23	Purdue University, West Lafayette	USA	189.3
24	Harbin Institute of Technology	China	187.9
25	Virginia Tech	USA	187.8
26	Beihang University	China	187.7
27	Columbia University	USA	186.2
28	Xidian University	China	185.7
29	University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign	USA	185.1
30	City University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong, China	182.9

Trend: Chinese (mainland + Hong Kong) institutions take 17 of the top 30 CS&E slots, including 5 of the top 10 — the most Chinese-dominated of the five subjects covered here. US institutions hold 9 of the top 30; the UK only one (Oxford). Carnegie Mellon, traditionally seen as the global CS leader by reputation rankings, sits at #8 on GRAS’s research-output metrics.

7. GRAS 2025 — Business Administration (Top 30)

Rank	Institution	Country	Total Score
1	Copenhagen Business School	Denmark	276.1
2	Indiana University, Bloomington	USA	274.0
3	Monash University	Australia	260.5
4	Harvard University	USA	249.7
5	University of Leeds	UK	240.2
6	RMIT University	Australia	239.6
7	University of Birmingham	UK	237.7
8	Pennsylvania State University, University Park	USA	236.5
9	Hanken School of Economics	Finland	229.2
10	Audencia Business School	France	223.1
11	Northeastern University (Boston)	USA	222.5
12	Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam	Netherlands	220.1
13	Texas A&M University	USA	218.6
14	The University of Manchester	UK	216.0
15	Deakin University	Australia	213.8
16	The University of Queensland	Australia	209.7
17	Western University	Canada	208.3
18	Curtin University	Australia	207.4
19	Erasmus University Rotterdam	Netherlands	205.2
19	The University of Tennessee, Knoxville	USA	205.2
21	University of Groningen	Netherlands	205.1
22	City University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong, China	204.6
22	The University of Reading	UK	204.6
24	Aston University	UK	204.5
25	The University of Melbourne	Australia	202.9
26	University of Sydney	Australia	201.5
27	Newcastle University	UK	200.7
28	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	USA	200.4
29	University of Pennsylvania	USA	199.9
30	BI Norwegian Business School	Norway	199.6

Trend: GRAS’s Business Administration list is strikingly different from the headline “MBA” rankings of QS or FT. Specialist business schools (Copenhagen Business School #1, Hanken #9, Audencia #10, BI Norwegian #30) and research-intensive Australian/UK universities (Monash #3, Leeds #5, Birmingham #7, RMIT #6) sit ahead of Harvard, Penn (Wharton) and Michigan because GRAS weights research outputs in top operations/management/marketing journals — not employer reputation, salaries or recruiter polls.

8. GRAS 2025 — Clinical Medicine (Top 30)

Rank	Institution	Country	Total Score
1	Harvard University	USA	400.3
2	University of Pennsylvania	USA	357.8
3	UC San Francisco (UCSF)	USA	338.2
4	UT MD Anderson Cancer Center	USA	301.4
5	Johns Hopkins University	USA	291.3
6	University of Cambridge	UK	289.9
7	UCLA	USA	280.5
8	Duke University	USA	275.2
9	University of Oxford	UK	272.9
10	Imperial College London	UK	271.2
11	University of Pittsburgh	USA	268.4
12	Oregon Health & Science University	USA	263.2
13	University of Washington	USA	262.7
14	University of Toronto	Canada	262.5
15	The Chinese University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong, China	261.1
16	Emory University	USA	257.2
17	University College London (UCL)	UK	257.1
18	Heidelberg University	Germany	254.0
19	The University of Melbourne	Australia	247.1
20	Mayo Clinic College of Medicine & Science, Minnesota	USA	246.2
21	MIT	USA	234.0
22	Stanford University	USA	226.4
23	Columbia University	USA	223.5
24	King’s College London	UK	220.5
25	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	USA	218.7
26	UC San Diego	USA	217.5
27	University of Leicester	UK	214.7
28	Yale University	USA	214.5
29	Northwestern University	USA	209.1
30	Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai	USA	204.9

Trend: US dominance is overwhelming — 19 of the top 30. UK universities take 6 places, all in the top 27. The Chinese University of Hong Kong (#15) is the highest-ranked Asian institution; mainland Chinese universities do not appear in the top 30 in Clinical Medicine, contrasting sharply with their dominance in CS&E and Mechanical Engineering.

9. GRAS 2025 — Mechanical Engineering (Top 30)

Rank	Institution	Country	Total Score
1	Tsinghua University	China	285.3
2	Harbin Institute of Technology	China	233.3
3	Nanyang Technological University	Singapore	223.4
4	MIT	USA	221.3
5	Xi’an Jiaotong University	China	216.1
6	Texas A&M University	USA	215.4
7	Beihang University	China	215.3
8	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	China	204.1
9	University of Cambridge	UK	203.1
10	Imperial College London	UK	202.1
11	Caltech	USA	200.0
12	Hong Kong Polytechnic University	Hong Kong, China	196.2
13	Northwestern Polytechnical University	China	187.8
14	UC San Diego	USA	184.7
15	National University of Singapore	Singapore	181.4
16	Huazhong University of Science & Technology	China	180.5
17	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	USA	175.7
18	Tianjin University	China	172.8
19	Dalian University of Technology	China	172.5
20	University of Nottingham	UK	172.2
20	Zhejiang University	China	172.2
22	Delft University of Technology	Netherlands	171.2
22	UT Austin	USA	171.2
24	Rice University	USA	167.7
25	New York University	USA	166.4
25	Technical University of Denmark	Denmark	166.4
27	KTH Royal Institute of Technology	Sweden	165.9
28	University of British Columbia	Canada	165.1
29	NTNU – Norwegian University of Science & Technology	Norway	163.8
30	USTC	China	161.8

Trend: China takes 13 of the top 30 Mechanical Engineering slots; the discipline is, alongside CS&E, the clearest signal of China’s research-output dominance. Tsinghua’s #1 score (285.3) is 22% ahead of #2 HIT and 29% ahead of MIT. Singapore (NTU #3, NUS #15) and Hong Kong PolyU (#12) reinforce the East-Asian engineering cluster.

10. GRAS 2025 — Economics (Top 30)

Rank	Institution	Country	Total Score
1	University of Chicago	USA	418.3
2	Harvard University	USA	405.1
3	MIT	USA	402.2
4	Stanford University	USA	376.4
5	UC Berkeley	USA	347.4
6	Princeton University	USA	322.4
7	Yale University	USA	308.3
8	London School of Economics (LSE)	UK	300.8
9	Columbia University	USA	282.8
10	NYU	USA	261.8
11	Northwestern University	USA	232.6
12	UCLA	USA	231.8
13	University of Oxford	UK	224.6
14	University of Pennsylvania	USA	214.8
15	Toulouse Capitole University (Toulouse School of Economics)	France	208.9
16	UC San Diego	USA	207.5
17	University of Toronto	Canada	193.0
18	University College London (UCL)	UK	190.9
19	University of Maryland, College Park	USA	185.5
20	Duke University	USA	185.4
21	Cornell University	USA	178.4
22	University of Cambridge	UK	178.2
23	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	USA	174.1
24	National University of Singapore	Singapore	172.6
25	Bocconi University	Italy	169.4
25	University of Wisconsin–Madison	USA	169.4
27	Peking University	China	168.5
28	Brown University	USA	166.7
29	University of Minnesota, Twin Cities	USA	162.9
30	University of Southern California	USA	160.3

Trend: Economics is the most US-dominated of the five subjects researched — 21 of the top 30 are American, the entire top 7 except LSE is American, and the “freshwater–saltwater” Chicago/MIT/Harvard/Stanford order at the top mirrors NRC and RePEc rankings. LSE (#8) is the highest European institution. Peking University (#27) is the only mainland-Chinese university in the top 30 — a sharp contrast to CS&E and Mechanical Engineering.

11. Historical context & dominance

Harvard has been ranked #1 every year since ARWU’s launch in 2003 — 23 consecutive years. Per Wikipedia’s Stanford University article citing ARWU historical data, Stanford has ranked second in the world after Harvard most years from 2003 to 2024; in the 2025 edition MIT remains #3 behind Stanford.
The same “Big Ten” — Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley, Oxford, Princeton, Columbia, Caltech, Chicago — have occupied the top 10 (in slightly varying order) for most of the past decade. Philip G. Altbach (Boston College), writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2010), specifically named ARWU’s “consistency, clarity of purpose, and transparency” as significant strengths.
The 2025 edition continues the most important secular trend: Mainland Chinese universities have surged from one institution in the top 100 a decade ago to 13 in 2025, with Tsinghua now in the top 20 for the first time.

Details

Difference between ARWU main ranking and GRAS — at a glance for landing-page copy

Dimension	ARWU (main)	GRAS
What it ranks	Whole universities, broad research excellence	Individual subjects (57 in 2025)
Indicators	6 (Nobel/Fields-heavy)	9 (no Nobel/Fields; uses awards, editors, top-journal papers, CNCI, Q1, IC)
Output universe	Top 1,000 of ~2,500 ranked	~20,000 subject entries from ~2,000 universities
Released annually in	August	November
Useful for	“Best overall university” decisions	Subject-specific course shortlisting

ATTENTION from Good Friends Japan Staff!

Research-heavy bias: ARWU’s main list rewards Nobel laureates, Highly Cited Researchers and Nature/Science publications — not teaching quality, employability or student experience. ARWU has been criticised by the European Commission and EU member states for “favour[ing] Anglo-Saxon higher education institutions,” and the recurring French objection focuses on its “ill-adapted character to the French academic system and the unreasonable weight given to research often performed decades ago.” The publisher’s own researchers, N.C. Liu & Y. Cheng, in “Academic ranking of world universities: Methodologies and problems,” Higher Education in Europe, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 127–136 (2005), explicitly state that “the quality of universities cannot be precisely measured by mere numbers and any ranking must be controversial.”
No Indian universities in the top 500 in 2025 — a notable caveat for South-Asian-market landing pages.
Same-rank ties are listed alphabetically in ShanghaiRanking’s tables; tied positions (e.g., 14, 26, 46, 51 in 2025) are not broken.
GRAS results can diverge from reputation: Copenhagen Business School #1 in Business Administration, or Toulouse Capitole #15 in Economics, will surprise students used to QS/FT — flag this explicitly.
Methodology change in 2025: the addition of AI and Robotic Science & Engineering as new subjects means year-on-year comparisons in those fields are not meaningful.
ShanghaiRanking site copy says “approximately 100 countries” but the official press-release coverage (China Daily, 19 Nov 2025) gives the more specific figure of 92 countries/regions for GRAS 2025.

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