Texas landed two universities in TIME’s new “World’s Top Universities of 2026” list: Rice University at No. 24 and the University of Texas at Austin at No. 37.
The University of Oxford took the top spot, followed by Yale, Stanford, MIT and the University of Chicago following respectively.
Unlike traditional prestige-focused rankings, TIME’s list is built around research output, innovation, and alumni outcomes, tracking how universities translate education into influence.
Rice University — No. 24
Rice ranked 24th globally, with an overall score of 75.78 — driven by strong showings in academic capacity and performance, as well as innovation and economic impact.
That profile reflects what has long set Rice apart. It’s a small, research-intensive university that punches well above its size in citations, patents and elite graduate outcomes. In a ranking that heavily weights academic performance and innovation, Rice benefits from its concentration of resources and its outsized role in research and professional pipelines — even as it remains far smaller than most public flagships on the list.
University of Texas at Austin — No. 37
The University of Texas at Austin landed at No. 37 worldwide, with an overall score of 70.72. Its strongest pillar was innovation and economic impact.
UT is a public university with deep ties to industry, research commercialization and workforce pipelines. While its global engagement score trails some smaller or more internationally oriented institutions, UT’s innovation score puts it in the same conversation as elite private universities.
Among the top 100 universities shown in TIME’s table, the field is heavily concentrated in a few places:
TIME says the ranking was produced with Statista and built on three weighted pillars:
TIME also notes a key limitation of global comparisons — data consistency varies by country — and says Statista “triangulated” international, national, and university-supplied data to reduce apples-to-oranges distortions.