QS 2026 “World University Rankings” in Philosophy
The 2026 “QS World University Rankings” have been published. These contain rankings by subject matter, including philosophy.
The rankings are conducted by the London-based education data firm Quacquarelli Symonds.
As I noted in a post about an earlier version of these rankings:
In the QS rankings, a school’s overall score for a particular subject is determined by a weighted formula that varies by area. In the arts and humanities, for the 2023 results, the formula used is: 60% academic reputation, 20% employer reputation, 7.5% citations per paper, 7.5% H-index, and 5% “International Research Metric“. (It is not clear why these factors are given these particular weights.)
QS does not specify whether its rankings are intended to assist prospective undergraduate or graduate students. The rankings have come under fire at various points for methodological concerns as well as conflicts of interest. Some of the results in philosophy will strike many readers as odd. So be aware that these rankings are controversial (as, of course, is the very idea of fine-grained rankings of places to study philosophy), and take note of alternative sources of information, such as departmental websites, Academic Philosophy Data & Analysis and the Philosophical Gourmet Report (noting that various criticisms have also been made of the latter).
With those caveats in mind, here are the top 50 schools in the 2026 QS Rankings in Philosophy:
| Rank | University Name | Employer Reputation | H-Index Citations | Citations Per Paper | Academic Reputation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New York University (NYU) | 75.7 | 90.5 | 96.8 | 100 |
| 2 | Rutgers University–New Brunswick | 57.2 | 77.5 | 85.7 | 97.7 |
| 3 | University of Oxford | 100 | 100 | 94.2 | 88.6 |
| 4 | Australian National University (ANU) | 82.8 | 85.5 | 93.2 | 91.4 |
| 5 | University of Pittsburgh | 40.3 | 78.3 | 84.7 | 96 |
| 6 | University of Wollongong | 63.7 | 79.1 | 97.4 | 90.4 |
| 7 | University of Cambridge | 98.1 | 88.6 | 88.6 | 86.1 |
| 8 | The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) | 97.1 | 87.1 | 95.6 | 85.2 |
| 9 | Harvard University | 98.4 | 83.7 | 87.1 | 84.2 |
| 10 | University of Toronto | 86.1 | 82.5 | 84.5 | 83.8 |
| 11 | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München | 77.5 | 83.1 | 85.3 | 82.2 |
| 12 | University of St Andrews | 74.3 | 81.8 | 87.7 | 81.9 |
| 13 | Princeton University | 80.9 | 83.1 | 90.5 | 80.7 |
| 14 | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | 85.2 | 79.1 | 86.8 | 81.3 |
| 14 | King’s College London | 88.8 | 83.7 | 87.5 | 80.3 |
| 16 | The University of Sydney | 76.7 | 84.9 | 87.7 | 80.3 |
| 17 | Stanford University | 95.8 | 81.2 | 88.1 | 79.2 |
| 18 | Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) | 70.5 | 81.8 | 94.3 | 79 |
| 18 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | 94.9 | 81.2 | 99 | 76.8 |
| 20 | University of Notre Dame | 54.7 | 79.1 | 85.6 | 81.3 |
| 21 | University of California, Berkeley (UCB) | 83.7 | 74.1 | 83.9 | 79.6 |
| 21 | Yale University | 89.3 | 75.9 | 85.1 | 78.9 |
| 23 | Ruhr-Universität Bochum | 55.6 | 86 | 87.5 | 78.8 |
| 24 | The University of Edinburgh | 82.6 | 83.7 | 87.5 | 75.8 |
| 25 | National University of Singapore (NUS) | 93.8 | 82.5 | 91.7 | 73.8 |
| 26 | University of Chicago | 79.2 | 70.1 | 77.2 | 77.8 |
| 27 | University of Michigan-Ann Arbor | 74.1 | 77.5 | 89.9 | 75 |
| 28 | University of Southern California | 71.5 | 81.8 | 92.7 | 73.5 |
| 29 | KU Leuven | 76.6 | 75.9 | 78 | 75.4 |
| 30 | Monash University | 74.4 | 80.5 | 88 | 72.4 |
| 31 | Universität Heidelberg | 87.2 | 65.2 | 75.6 | 74.1 |
| 32 | University of Amsterdam | 80.7 | 87.6 | 90.9 | 68.5 |
| 33 | Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) | 89.4 | 70.1 | 90.8 | 69.6 |
| 34 | Freie Universitaet Berlin | 78.9 | 74.1 | 83.1 | 70.6 |
| 35 | Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne | 82.5 | 66.5 | 69 | 73 |
| 36 | University of Navarra | 71.2 | 65.2 | 69 | 73.7 |
| 37 | Wuhan University | 80.4 | 65.2 | 81.3 | 71.3 |
| 38 | The University of Warwick | 74.3 | 83.7 | 88.8 | 68 |
| 39 | Durham University | 79.7 | 80.5 | 89.4 | 67.9 |
| 39 | Kyoto University | 72.2 | 50.6 | 69.5 | 75.1 |
| 41 | University of Bristol | 67.8 | 84.3 | 92.3 | 67.6 |
| 42 | University of Turin | 63.3 | 71.2 | 72.3 | 72.1 |
| 43 | University of California, Irvine | 0 | 83.1 | 89.9 | 72.3 |
| 44 | University of Southampton | 64.3 | 82.5 | 95.6 | 67.2 |
| 45 | Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main | 48.3 | 74.1 | 82 | 71 |
| 46 | University of Leeds | 64.9 | 80.5 | 90.2 | 67.6 |
| 46 | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | 55.1 | 79.8 | 90.8 | 68.3 |
| 48 | Université PSL | 66.4 | 79.1 | 81.4 | 68.7 |
| 49 | University of Vienna | 78.5 | 80.5 | 82.3 | 67.1 |
| 50 | University of Copenhagen | 66.1 | 82.5 | 89.8 | 66.1 |
I took part in these rankings once (or maybe twice) and can say that people ought to put _very_ little weight in the “academic reputation” ranking. (That is, I suppose, what I took part in.) When I took part, it asked you to self-identify which fields you were an expert in, and which parts of the world, and then asked you to list schools you thought had a good reputation. It did not provide faculty lists, or even really a list of schools. If you ever thought the gourmet report had problems, they are _much_ worse here. It simply should not be taken seriously. (It’s also pretty easy to set things up so you can vote for your own institution if you want to.) (Partly for these reasons, I didn’t take part this year.)
Same here!
The University of Wollongong’s philosophy department has a better “academic reputation” than The University of Oxford’s?
Appropriate username for this comment!
I think we all agree that the obvious problem is that my university isn’t on the list.
These rankings are completely ridiculous. As someone in my department pointed out, the University of Calcutta’s philosophy department is ranked higher than UCLA’s. I’m sure Calcutta has a nice department, but I’m skeptical that their philosophy department outranks my department, let alone UCLA’s, along any reasonable metric!
Many things can be true at once, of which two are:
good point. it’s ironic to see people criticize the rankings by relying on…personal opinions. of course, intuitions can serve as off-the-shelf checks of the ranking, but in general surely principled surveys trump small sample intuitions
Principled surveys trump small sample intuitions, for sure! But small sample intuitions can easily trump “objective quantitative rankings”, if those objective quantitative rankings are based on some irrelevant number.
This is the institutional equivalent of bragging about your IQ score.
So a graduate student consulting these would come away thinking that the University of Wollongong is better than Harvard and Princeton in philosophy. (And Toronto, and Yale). Uh huh.
What does a student asking ChatGPT get?
I’m really struck by that “employer reputation” column – mainly because my own university managed to get that coveted “0”! From looking at the others, I’m guessing this is related to non-specialist prestige of the university (which is why Rutgers, Pitt, and Wollongong are much lower on this than most of the others). But still, a 0 is quite impressive!
lmao what
Now hold up, Slickback.
No, it’s A Philosopher Named Slickback. Like A Tribe Called Quest; you say the whole thing
Some years ago I was invited to participate in the ranking exercise and I declined on the grounds that such rankings are pernicious in presuming that there is some conception of quality (usually called “excellence”) that all universities or departments should be aspiring towards. Aiming to be in this way generically excellent is incompatible with aiming to be good at being a particular institution with a particular history, in a particular place, in a neighborhood, region, country, continent with particular needs and strengths. What such a focus can lead to is not isolationist parochialism, but rather transnational engagement to which different institutions bring distinctive contributions, rather than all trying to do more or less the same thing, just better than anyone else.