Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings 2021

The Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings, based on 15 performance indicators, is designed to answer the questions that matter most to students and their families: How likely am I to graduate, pay off my loans and get a good job? Does the college have plenty of resources to teach me properly? Will I be engaged and stretched in the classroom and get good access to my teachers? Is there a diverse campus community?

The 2021 ranking includes almost 800 universities.

View the WSJ/THE College Rankings 2021 methodology

This year, Harvard University tops the table for the fourth year in a row, while the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University remain in second and third place respectively.

Stanford University is now ranked fourth, up from joint seventh, replacing the University of Pennsylvania, which drops nine places to 13th.

Meanwhile, Brown and Duke universities are now ranked joint fifth, having risen two and five places, respectively, in the past year. Duke’s climb is the biggest in the top 20, matched only by Carnegie Mellon University’s leap from joint 25th to 20th place.

The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor is now the top public university in the table after overtaking the University of California, Los Angeles.

Read our analysis of the WSJ/THE College Rankings 2021 results

The student-focused WSJ/THE College Rankings differ considerably from the THE World University Rankings, which have a heavier emphasis on research excellence on a global scale.

Note: all ranked institutions have an overall score and four pillar scores. However, for each pillar, only institutions ranked in the top 400 overall, or the top 400 in that pillar, have a publicly visible score.

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