Paris universities are renown for providing one of the best trainings in the world for many years, alongside British and American universities. Yet, according to the ranking put up by the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), only three colleges in the city manage to rank in the top 50: Paris Sciences et Lettres, La Sorbonne, and Université Paris Cité.
These three colleges also rank in the top 5 on a domestic scale in France. The Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) ranks the best, with the 19th rank, two better than last year, according to the following criteria: quality or training and research, employability, level of the teaching staff. Over the past ten years, some Parisian colleges have gathered to create bigger entities. Therefore, the PSL group includes the Collège de France, the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), the Paris-Dauphine university, the Institut Curie and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.
Ranking 38th, the prestigious La Sorbonne college, while the gathering of Université Paris Cité – including Paris-Descartes, Paris-Diderot and the Institut de Physique du Globe – ranks 42nd. In Île-de-France, two universities in Essonne make it to the top 50 list: Paris-Saclay, 32nd, and the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, 43rd.
But which university is the best in the world? No surprise, this is Harvard, overtaking every other for many years. Then, in the top 5, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Cambridge and Oxford. The first university that is not American or British ranks 15th and is the Tokyo University.
