U.S. News & World Report released its top universities around the world for 2025-2026, and 7 New Jersey higher institutions made the full list, with one breaking the Top 20.
The first New Jersey school on the list, Princeton University, ranked No. 16 along with Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and University of California San Francisco. Princeton was founded in 1746, making it one of the oldest colleges in the U.S. It has an undergraduate college, a graduate school, the School of Architecture, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The university is affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
Around 12 percent of undergraduates and more than 40 percent of graduate students at Princeton are international. Recently, Princeton University was named the most beautiful college campus and the most Instagrammable.
Two Rutgers campuses made the list, both New Brunswick (156) and Newark (645). The state university has a great reputation both within and outside of New Jersey, due to its name recognition, extensive alumni network, and the hiring of graduates by international companies.
STEM-based New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark (873) and Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken (1,014) are known for their hands-on approach to science and engineering education.
Two other public schools, Montclair State University (1,428) and Rowan University (1,882) rounded out New Jersey’s presence on the list. Part of Montclair, MSU is very LGBTQ-friendly, and was the first institution in New Jersey to offer four-year programs in pedagogy (the approach to teaching), master’s degrees, and broadcast educational television programs. Rowan is one of only three top schools in the nation to offer both medical (MD) and Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degrees.
U.S. News & World Report looked at schools in 105 countries and ranked them based on 13 indicators that measure academic research performance, global and regional reputations, research reputation, books and publications, international collaboration, and citations of papers from students attending the school. Most of the info came from Clarivate, which created a pool of 2,346 universities that was used to rank the top 2,250 schools.
New Jersey’s top universities for 2025-2026, according to U.S. News & World Report are:
16. Princeton University, Princeton
156. Rutgers University-New Brunswick, New Brunswick
645. Rutgers University-Newark, Newark
873. New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark
1014. Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken
1428. Montclair State University, Montclair
1882. Rowan University, Glassboro
The Best Global Universities Rankings for 2025-2026, according to U.S. News & World Report:
1. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts
3. Stanford University, Stanford, Connecticut
4. University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
5. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
6. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California
7. University College London, London, United Kingdom
8. University of Washington, Seattle, Seattle, Washington
9. Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
10. Columbia University, New York City, New York
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