Singapore and China universities make a mark in latest rankings by subject

NUS, NTU, and Tsinghua University did well for their courses in social sciences, engineering, and natural sciences respectively.

Singapore's National University of Singapore (NUS) and National Technological University (NTU), and China's Tsinghua University are the only three Asia-based universities to have made it to the top 10, by subject, in the latest QS World University Ranking by Subject 2026.

The ranking was dominated by North American universities, which had the highest total number of ranked subjects.

In Asia, Eastern Asia had the most new entries, including both newly ranked institutions and newly ranked subjects; while Southern Asia was the most improved region proportionally, with the largest share of subjects moving up in the rankings.

The Asian rankings by subject is as follows: 

NUS (Singapore)

• Engineering & technology faculty (8^th, with a score of 89.3)
• Social sciences & management (8^th, with a score of 88.5)

NTU (Singapore)

• Engineering & technology faculty (10^th, with a score of 88.9)

Tsinghua University (Mainland China)

• Natural sciences faculty (10^th, with a score of 88.8)

Broadly, the rankings were broken down into five subjects: arts and humanities, engineering and technology, life sciences and medicine, natural sciences, and social sciences and management. Below are the universities that came up in the top 10 for each: 

Arts and humanities

1. University of Oxford (UK), with a score of 97.8
2. Harvard University (USA), with a score of 97.7
3. University of Cambridge (UK), with a score of 96.7
4. Stanford University (USA), with a score of 93.1
5. Yale University (USA), with a score of 91.2
6. Columbia University (USA), with a score of 91.1
7. University of California, Berkeley (UCB) (USA), with a score of 91
8. UCL (UK), with a score of 90.7
9. The University of Edinburgh (UK), with a score of 90.4
10. New York University (NYU) (USA), with a score of 89.2

Engineering and technology

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (USA), with a score of 95.9
2. Stanford University (USA), with a score of 93.5
3. ETH Zurich (Switzerland), with a score of 92.7
4. University of Oxford (UK), with a score of 92.5
5. University of Cambridge (UK), with a score of 92.3
6. University of California, Berkeley (UCB) (USA), with a score of 91.6
7. Imperial College London (UK), with a score of 91.1
8. National University of Singapore (NUS) (Singapore), with a score of 89.3
9. Harvard University (USA), with a score of 89
10. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), with a score of 88.9

Life sciences & medicine 

1. Harvard University (USA), with a score of 99.2
2. University of Oxford (UK), with a score of 95
3. Johns Hopkins University (USA), with a score of 92.9
4. Stanford University (USA), with a score of 92.8
5. University of Cambridge (UK), with a score of 91.8
6. UCL (UK), with a score of 90.2
7. University of California, San Francisco (USA), with a score of 90.2
8. Imperial College London (UK), with a score of 90.2
9. King's College London (UK), with a score of 88.6
10. Yale University (USA), with a score of 88.5

Natural sciences

1. Harvard University (USA), with a score of 96.3
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (USA), with a score of 95.9
3. University of Oxford (UK), with a score of 95.7
4. University of Cambridge (UK), with a score of 94.6
5. Stanford University (USA), with a score of 94
6. ETH Zurich (Switzerland), with a score of 93.3
7. University of California, Berkeley (UCB) (USA), with a score of 93
8. California Institute of Technology (Caltech) (USA), with a score of 92.6
9. Imperial College London (UK), with a score of 90.5
10. Tsinghua University (Mainland China), with a score of 88.8

Social sciences and management

1. Harvard University (USA), with a score of 97.4
2. University of Oxford (UK), with a score of 94.7
3. Stanford University (USA), with a score of 93.3
4. University of Cambridge (UK), with a score of 92.7
5. The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) (UK), with a score of 91.8
6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (USA), with a score of 91.5
7. Yale University (USA), with a score of 88.6
8. National University of Singapore (NUS) (Singapore), with a score of 88.5
9. University of California, Berkeley (UCB) (USA), with a score of 88.1
10. Columbia University (USA), with a score of 88

Snippets from the results

In terms of subjects, while computer science & information systems and medicine were the most widely ranked subject across the globe, linguistics also showed the largest proportional improvement. Data science and artificial intelligence were also the subject area with the most new entries.

Latin America and the Caribbean showed a relatively balanced pattern of movement, while Northern Africa stood out for its high proportion of new entries (32%), pointing to increased participation in the rankings.

On the flipside, more established regions such as Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia recorded the largest share of institutions moving down the rankings (both 43%), while Western Europe and North America also saw notable downward movement.

Methodology

Instead of ranking individual courses, the QS Subject Rankings evaluates an institution’s overall academic offering in the five broad faculty areas as listed above. 

The ranking methodology took five indicators into account: academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per paper, H-Index and international research network — each weighted differently, depending on the subject, to reflect the unique priorities of that particular field. 

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