University of Toronto ranked among top 25 schools in the world

A prestigious academic ranking has named three universities in Canada among the top 100 in the world.

ShanghaiRanking Consultancy released its 2025 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) on Friday. This year, more than 2,500 institutions were considered for the annual list, including 28 universities in Canada.

The ARWU, which began in 2003, examines several factors when ranking schools, including the number of Nobel Prizes, Fields medalists, highly cited researchers, and papers published in Nature or Science produced by the school.

Additionally, it also looks at universities with a significant amount of papers indexed in the Science Citation Index-Expanded, Social Science Citation Index and the Web of Science.

Each of those criteria is weighted, and schools are given a score out of 100. The best 1,000 schools of the 2,500 schools considered are published.

The universities in Canada that made it on to the top 100 list are the University of Toronto (UofT), University of British Columbia (UBC), and McGill University.

UofT placed 25th globally, up one spot from 26 in 2024. It received a score of 41.5 out of 100, placing just above New York University and a couple of spots below Johns Hopkins University.

Following pretty far behind is UBC. It placed 53rd on the 2025 ranking, dropping six spots from 47th place in 2024. It scored 32.3 out of 100, tying with the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign.

Lastly, McGill took the 76th spot, tying with KU Leuven and Monash University. The Montreal university dropped two spots from 74th place last year. It scored 29.6 out of 100 on the 2025 ranking.

The straight A students on the list are Harvard University, Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They ranked first to third place, respectively.

According to ShanghaiRanking, Harvard takes the top spot for the 23rd year in a row.  Other Top 10 universities are Cambridge (4th), Berkeley (5th), Oxford (6th), Princeton (7th), Columbia (8th), Caltech (9th), and Chicago (10th).