A Global Academic Powerhouse: UC San Diego Named World’s 15th Best University

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A prestigious new ranking has listed the University of California San Diego 15th among the world’s best universities for its award-winning faculty and alumni, as well as producing high-impact and prolific research. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) released its new report of the best universities today, also naming UC San Diego 13th among U.S. colleges and fourth among the country’s public universities.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities annual list has consistently included UC San Diego among the top 20 higher education institutions throughout the globe for nearly a decade.

“UC San Diego is proud to receive this recognition as a premier research university with an international impact,” said Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. “UC San Diego is home to faculty, researchers and students who tackle our global society’s most pressing and complex challenges and create bold solutions that benefit humanity.”

The rankings are based on six objective indicators including the number of alumni and faculty winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of highly cited researchers, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance.

From research uncovering record temperatures across the Pacific Ocean, to findings that reveal hiring high-skilled immigrant workers leads to increased innovation, and creating stem cells that could help repair spinal cord injuries, UC San Diego’s faculty and scholars are the forefront of the critical breakthroughs of our time.

UC San Diego consistently performs well in national and international rankings. The Center for World University Rankings recently named UC San Diego the globe’s 20th best university and the campus topped the list of the Times Higher Education rankings of research universities founded during the “golden age” of higher education, in the two decades between 1945 and 1967. In addition, many UC San Diego graduate programs were ranked in the top 20 in the 2018 U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Schools guidebook.

The Academic Ranking of World Universities are released by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a public research university located in Shanghai, renowned as one of the most prestigious universities in China.

This year, the organization ranked 1,000 universities and published the top 500 online. For more information, click here. 

For a complete listing of rankings, accolades and additional campus information, click here.