China's Tsinghua named world's best university for computer science

The Beijing-based university earned a perfect subject score of 100 in the 2026-2027 U.S. News Best Global Universities Subject Rankings for computer science.

It also ranked first in three of the ranking's 12 performance indicators: conference publications, total citations, and the number of publications among the world's top 10% most-cited papers.

The ranking, released in June, evaluated 1,500 universities that met a minimum threshold of 250 research papers published between 2020 and 2024.

Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Photo courtesy of Tsinghua

Asian universities dominated the top of the rankings, taking eight of the top 10 places. Mainland China accounted for four institutions, with Peking University and Zhejiang University ranking second and third.

Singapore's Nanyang Technological University and National University of Singapore placed fourth and sixth, while Hong Kong's Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology ranked seventh and 10th.

Stanford University in the U.S. and ETH Zurich in Switzerland were the only non-Asian institutions in the top 10.

The University of Oxford, ranked 27th, was the highest-placed university from the U.K.

Across the top 30, Asian universities occupied 21 places, compared with six for the U.S. and three for Europe.

World's top 10 universities for computer science in 2026-2027

Beyond computer science, Tsinghua ranked sixth globally and first in Asia in the overall U.S. News Best Global Universities rankings.

It also ranked first globally in 10 of U.S. News' 51 academic subjects, including artificial intelligence, engineering and chemistry.