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If you’re starting to think about your university application, someone over the age of 40 has probably already told you that the era ahead ‘will be the best years of your life’. And sure, it can be great fun, but there’s no need to panic at the thought of that (slightly ridiculous) expectation – you just gotta do your research and follow your gut.
To make the application process simpler, Times Higher Education annually releases a roundup of the world’s best universities. The ranking involves a thorough assessment of more than 2,000 institutions across 155 different countries, and the latest edition for 2025 is here.
The list is heavily dominated by American institutions, which claim seven of the top 10 overall spots.
However, the other three are claimed by UK universities, with Oxford ranking as the very best university in the world for 2025. Cambridge and Imperial College London are the other two top-ten entries – you can read all about each British institution included in the top 200 here.
In second place it’s MIT (which topped this ranking), and in third place it’s Harvard (which topped this ranking). Check out the rest of the list below.
These are the best universities in the world
- University of Oxford
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Harvard University
- Princeton University
- University of Cambridge
- Stanford University
- California Institute of Technology
- University of California, Berkeley
- Imperial College London
- Yale University
- ETH Zurich
- Tsinghua University
- Peking University
- The University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania
- Johns Hopkins University
- National University of Singapore
- Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles
- Cornell University
- University of Toronto
- UCL and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
- Carnegie Mellon University
- University of Washington
More on higher education at Time Out
We’ve reported on rankings from QS Top Universities and the Academic Ranking of World Universities, as we know picking where to go to uni is one hell of a decision. Then there’s roundups of the prettiest campuses on the planet, and the best cities to be a student, because life isn’t all about studying, right?
Did you see that the EU is giving away 35,500 free rail passes to young people?
Plus: The world’s cheapest countries to travel to in 2025 have been revealed?
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