Best International Schools

The United States is renowned for having some of the world’s best colleges. But for international students and adventurous Americans, these are the best halls of higher learning outside America’s borders.

Methodology: To find the best colleges outside of the United States, Newsweek broke down the most recent available data from three major international college rankings: the Times Higher Education World Rankings, Webometrics world college rankings from public-research outlet Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Spain, and the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy. Each of the following were weighted equally to determine the final ranking: THE’s overall ranking, which combines a mix of teacher quality, research output, academic citations, research income, and the geographic diversity of staff and students; Webometrics’ size rank, a measure of each school’s Web presence; Webometrics’ visibility rank, a measure of unique links to each school’s website; Webometrics’ scholar rank, which is the number of papers and citations attributed to each school; SRC’s alumni rank, which tallies the number of alumni who have won Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals; SRC’s award rank, which measures the institution staff who have won Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals; SRC’s HiCI rank, which measures highly cited researchers affiliated with each school; and finally, SRC’s tally of papers published in Nature and Science for each institution.

We used the 104 colleges that appear on each of these lists. Keep in mind, the rankings here for each school are within this 104-college cohort.