Time Magazine partnered with Statista to release a new ranking of the world’s top 500 universities last week, placing Yale at the no. 2 spot globally.
Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. (Credit: Owen Tilman)
Jack Ehlert
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
On January 28, TIME Magazine published a new ranking of the world’s top universities. Oxford, Yale, and Stanford took the top three spots, with MIT and The University of Chicago rounding out the top five.
Yale ranks higher in this list than it does in comparable rankings for 2026, including those of the U.S. News & World Report and The Wall Street Journal where Yale took the fourth and third spots, respectively.
TIME’s list, created in collaboration with Statista, used a methodology that scored schools based on a weighted average of the three categories of “academic capacity & performance” (60%), “innovation & economic output” (30%), and “global engagement” (10%).
Attributes such as Yale’s low student-to-faculty ratio, high retention and graduation rates, and impressive median alumni salary contributed to Yale’s distinguished performance across numerous rankings. Other, less commonly used factors, such as the 9 Nobel Laureates who received awards while actively affiliated with Yale and the high proportion of international students likely contributed to Yale’s success in the TIME ranking.
The admissions office declined to comment on the ranking. However, in a blog post on the admissions website, Yale’s former Dean of Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel noted, “The simplicity and clarity that ranking systems seem to offer are not only misleading, but can also be harmful. Rankings tend to ignore the very criteria that may be most important to an applicant, such as specific academic offerings, intellectual and social climate, ease of access to faculty, international opportunities and placement rates for careers or for graduate and professional school.”
While ranking systems may be unable to capture certain factors that contribute to a student’s experience, they nevertheless remain an accurate indicator of student success. As TIME explains, “The ranking places emphasis on the extent to which students achieve extraordinary success, for instance in patenting new inventions or rising to leadership roles in business. These lists help us understand where students are likely to achieve the greatest success and contribute most to society as the world order shifts.”
TIME’s claim is corroborated by an August 2025 study done by researchers at Harvard and Brown that found, “Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of a flagship public college triples students’ chances of obtaining jobs at prestigious firms and substantially increases their chances of earning in the top 1%.”
While some argue that the students rather than the colleges themselves are responsible for financial success, TIME is skeptical of this claim, noting, “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% of the income distribution, work at prestigious firms, and achieve success in many other dimensions.”
The influence from prestigious institutions, TIME claims, comes at a cost, as they potentially perpetuate existing inequalities. What their ranking reveals is “an uncomfortable reality: in most countries, these top universities are most accessible to children from high-income families, limiting their socioeconomic diversity.”
Institutions are aware of this reality and are implementing new policies in an attempt to combat this lack of socioeconomic diversity. Just last month, Yale joined Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania in offering free tuition to families earning less than $200,000 per year.
For the class of 2030, Yale admitted a record-high 118 low-income students through the QuestBridge College Match Program.