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UWaterloo moves up in QS World University Rankings

In the newest QS global university rankings the University of Waterloo was top-150 overall for the first time.

For the first time, the University of Waterloo has moved into the top-150 in the QS World University Overall Rankings, which grades institutions on reputation, teaching, research and global outreach across all disciplines.

The 2022 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) global university rankings placed UWaterloo at 149th worldwide, an improvement of 17 spots over 2021 and 24 spots over 2020. A top-150 ranking is notable as QS includes 1,300 universities from 90 countries in its analysis.

UWaterloo was ranked 7th in Canada and 3rd in Ontario.

This new overall ranking comes on the heels of QS subject rankings, in which UWaterloo ranked 38th globally in the Engineering and Technology category, ahead of Yale University (43rd) and Columbia University (47th) in the United States, the Eindhoven University of Technology (50th) in the Netherlands and the Technische Universität (60th) in Berlin.

Finally, at the subject level, UWaterloo came in at 23rd overall for computer science, 35th for mathematics and 48th for electrical and electronic engineering. The university ranked top-100 in 12 additional subjects as well.

When it comes to UWaterloo, it isn’t just quality, but quantity, too. The university has higher engineering student enrollment than the CaliforniaUWaterloo Enrollment Comparison Institute of Technology (CalTech), Columbia University, Stanford University or Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Our 5 Charts series found that UWaterloo produced more tech graduates than similar programs in Austin, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Salt Lake City or Detroit.

QS is the world’s largest international higher education network. It ranks the world’s top universities on 51 subjects based on factors such as academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, student-to-faculty ratio, the proportion of international faculty and proportion of international students. The rankings provide a comparative analysis on the performance of 14,435 individual university programs, taken by students at 1,453 universities, found in 86 locations across the world, in 51 academic disciplines and five broad Faculty Areas.

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