New rankings name UC San Diego the fourth best public university in the U.S. and the 21st best university in the world. The rankings by the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) are based on quality of research, faculty, influence, enterprise and successful alumni.
The fourth annual global rankings also list UC San Diego as the 16th best university in the U.S. among both private and public colleges. In the category of “influence,” which measures the number of research papers appearing in highly-influential journals, UC San Diego places as the fifth best university in the world.
The methodology for CWUR’s 2015 rankings analyzed the world’s top 1,000 universities, measuring eight indicators designed to give the most accurate assessment of their quality of education and training of students as well as the prestige of faculty members and quality of their research. According to CWUR, the rankings do not rely on opinion-based surveys, but instead rely on a purely data-driven approach to measure academic and research excellence.
In addition to its fifth-place finish for influence, UC San Diego also ranks highly in the categories of broad impact (15th), citations (15th), publications (16th), patents (17th) and quality of faculty (19th). The only area where UC San Diego fell among the bottom half of the 1,000 universities was in 'alumni employment', which is based on the number of alumni who have held CEO positions at the world's top companies relative to the university's size.
Read the complete list of CWUR’s top 1,000 universities in the world.