Harvard best in the world for 20 years in a row, UGent and KU Leuven in the top 100 (domestic)

American universities usually dominate the rankings. Stanford University ranks second and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is out of the top three. The University of Cambridge in Britain is the fourth largest institution from a country other than the United States. The Oxford native is in seventh place. The other institutions in the top ten are American: Berkeley (5), Princeton (6), Columbia (8), Caltech (9) and the University of Chicago (10). The Top 100 includes 39 US institutions.

Université Paris-Saclay is the first non-Anglo-Saxon university in position 16. In their country, UGent (74) and KU Leuven (95) are among the top 100, but last year they performed even better with 71st and 87th places respectively.

The Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) is at 101 and 150, while the French-speaking UCL and UAntwerp are at 201 and 300. The University of Liège and the Free University of Brussels are between places 301 and 400 and the University of Hasselt is between places 601 and 700. The University of Mons ranks between places 301 and 400. Between 801 and 900.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) is distilled annually by Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, an independent organization focused on higher education. More than 2,500 research institutions around the world were analyzed for ranking. Among the six criteria used by Shanghai are the number of Nobel Prize winners, the number of most cited scientists in their discipline, and the number of publications in the scientific journals Science and Nature. The ranking has been published since 2003.