University of Toronto drops out of top 30 in latest global rankings

The University of Toronto has fallen out of the world's top 30 universities, according to a new report that analyzed nearly 1,500 post-secondary institutions in more than 100 countries.

The QS World University Rankings 2027, published on Thursday by QS Quacquarelli Symonds, analyzes universities worldwide across several performance categories, including research and discovery, employability and outcomes, learning experience, global engagement, and sustainability.

These categories are further broken down into indicators, such as academic reputation, citations per faculty, employer reputation, employment outcomes, faculty-student ratio, international faculty ratio, international research network, international student diversity, and international student ratio.

Overall, U of T came in at #32 this year with a score of 86.8, down from #29 in the 2026 rankings. The university was ranked #25 in 2025, #21 in 2024, #34 in 2023, #26 in 2022, and #25 in 2021.

The rankings mark a continued decline from the university's peak ranking in 2014, when it placed 17th globally.

Despite the drop in overall score, U of T performed strongly in several categories, receiving the second-highest sustainability score (99.8) out of all the universities analyzed. The school also earned high marks for its employee reputation (99.5) and international student ratio (97.8).

However, it was its lower scores in citations per faculty (64.5) and faculty-student ratio (38.0) that weighed down its overall ranking.

The highest-ranked Canadian academic institution on the list was McGill University, which placed #27 overall with a score of 87.5.

Other Canadian universities to appear in the rankings included theUniversity of British Columbia (#45), University of Alberta (#96), University of Waterloo (tied for #113), Western University (tied for #142), Université de Montréal (tied for #162), McMaster University (tied for $174), Queen's University (tied for #179), and University of Ottawa (tied for #228).

These are the top 10 universities in the world for 2027, according to the rankings

• #1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• #2 (tied) Imperial College London and Stanford University
• #4 University of Oxford
• #5 Harvard University
• #6 University of Cambridge
• #7 California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
• #8 (tied) ETH Zurich and UCL
• #10 National University of Singapore (NUS)