Offering unique insight into diversity drives, research excellence, and employability enhancement, QS Quacquarelli Symonds has today released their second annual list of America’s top universities.

Recognized internationally for their QS World University Rankings portfolio – the world’s most-consulted global rankings resource – the QS USA University Rankings are designed by QS to offer a methodology that captures the American higher education sector’s concerns and challenges.
This methodology includes a foregrounded focus upon Diversity - including Faculty Gender Diversity, Number of Fulbright Recipients per Institution, and Student Ethnicity Mix – in order to provide American students, university leadership, and higher education policymakers with information about which universities are doing most to reduce sectoral gender and racial inequities. The Diversity indicator is jointly led by the University of California Davis – last year’s number-one - and New York University.

The results indicate that many of the universities doing most to foster stronger equity and diversity outcomes are not among the United States’ strongest research universities, and that Californian institutions perform particularly well when viewed through this lens. Key insights from QS’s Diversity & Internationalization indicator include:

• Only six of the top twenty universities in the overall table also achieve a top-20 score for Diversity & Internationalization.
• Among the Top 100, the institutions with the highest student ethnic diversity are University of California, Riverside, University of California, Irvine, and University of Hawaii at Manoa
• Excluding the University of the Pacific, every top-100 institution in the Top 10 for Student Ethnicity Mix is a public university, indicating that public universities are meeting their social obligations to increase diversity.
• Among the Top 100, the institutions with the highest proportion of female staff are Barnard College and Wellesley College, both private women’s liberal arts colleges. Both have over 60% female academic staff.
• QS’s dataset offers evidence that some of America’s top research institutions perform less strongly when gender diversity is examined. MIT, scoring third for Research, has only 28% female staff, and Stanford (second for research) only records 35% of its staff as female.
• QS’s data also shows that tech-focused institutions are still lagging behind their peers in terms of widening female workforce participation.

Among the ranking’s top 100, the institutions with the lowest ratio of female to male staff are Caltech, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Institute of Technology, and MIT.

Recognizing the intensifying focus placed by students on high-quality career outcomes in a challenging graduate employment market, the QS USA University Rankings also prioritizes employability as a key lens through which to assess institutional performance. Harvard University, which retains its status as America’s highest-ranking institution, achieves a nation-leading score of 100/100 for Employability.

With teaching quality also prominent in student minds when they come to choose a study destination, QS’s methodology also includes indicators that capture Learning Experience. Princeton University (8th overall) can claim to offer the US’s top learning experience, scoring 100/100 for this metric group.

Other highlights include:
• All of America’s top six universities are based in either Massachusetts (two) or California (four).
• University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) breaks into the top five, now placing fifth. It performs strongest in the Learning Experience indicator, in which it scores 90.5/100.
• New York University, driven by its nation-leading performance for Diversity & Internationalization, breaks into the national top ten (now 9th).
• QS’s Research indicator is led by Harvard University: Stanford (2nd) and the University of California at Berkeley (3rd) are next-best.

Jack Moran, QS Spokesperson, said: “While the overall QS World University Rankings continue to command record levels of interest, we are conscious that the American higher education sector is wrestling with questions that do not fall within the scope of our global rankings – questions of equity, access, representation, and social justice. The QS USA University Rankings exercise has been carefully crafted to shine some – independent – light on which institutions are doing most to foster the essential relationship between education and social change.”
QS USA University Rankings 2021: Top Ten
Overall rank Institute name State
1 Harvard University MA
2 Stanford University CA
3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) MA
4 University of California, Berkeley (UCB) CA
5 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) CA
6 Yale University CT
7 Columbia University NY
8 Princeton University NJ
9 New York University (NYU) NY
10 University of Pennsylvania PA

© QS Quacquarelli Symonds 2004-2021 https://www.TopUniversities.com/. All rights reserved.

Full methodological details can be found at: https://www.topuniversities.com/usa-rankings/methodology.
The full rankings will be available from www.TopUniversities.com from Wednesday 5th May, 10:00 UTC.