World’s best universities: Singapore’s NUS and NTU make the top 15 out of 100 for 2025

Much has been said about Singapore’s general education system over the years – both good and bad – but where universities are concerned, it’s safe to say that standards are top notch. Don’t believe us? An official list of the world’s top 100 universities for 2025 is making its rounds, and the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) are both on the list as part of the 15 best.

Zooming in on the specifics – NUS has been ranked as the eighth best university in the world, and it’s also the top university in all of Asia. On the other hand, NTU scores fifteenth globally and third in Asia, coming in right behind Peking University from China.

Other public universities from Singapore, such as the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) and Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) did not make the list.

You might be surprised to know that what’s deemed the best university in the world is not an ivy league college, but rather, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from the USA, which specialises mainly in Science and tech. Snagging second place is Imperial College London from the UK, followed by the University of Oxford in third place.

Here are the top 10 universities in Asia for 2025:

1. National University of Singapore (NUS)
2. Peking University, China
3. Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore
4. University of Hong Kong (UKU)
5. Tsinghua University, China
6. Seoul National University, South Korea
7. University of Tokyo, Japan
8. Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)
9. Fudan University, China
10. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

And here are the top 10 universities in the world for 2025:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
2. Imperial College London, UK
3. University of Oxford, UK
4. Harvard University, USA
5. University of Cambridge, UK
6. Stanford University, USA
7. ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Switzerland
8. National University of Singapore (NUS)
9. UCL (University College London), UK
10. California Institute of Technology (Caltech), USA

Guess you know which schools to aim for now if you want the best of the best on your CV.

This list was compiled by QS World University Rankings, which has been running for more than 20 years. Various metrics including but not limited to academic reputation, employment outcomes, and citations per faculty have been carefully considered during the ranking process.

Check out the full global ranking of the world’s best universities for 2025 here.

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