a-index World University Rankings 2023

World university rankings introduced by Applyindex are based on an index that shows the difficulty of getting fully funded PhD positions. It is called a-index! The a-index world university rankings are, for the first time, introduced to the PhD applicants in the year 2023. The suggested rankings by Applyindex are totally different from the rankings QS Top Universities, Times Higher Education, US News, and similar ranking websites provide.

a-index

a-index is a function of 8 different factors including a university’s annual number of scientific publications, the reputation of its academic staff members, minimum requirements for their PhD admission process, etc. It is an index out of 100. The higher a-index shows the harder PhD admission process or the lower PhD acceptance rate.

World university rankings 2023

World university rankings with regard to a-index are only given for 50 universities (Table 1) at the moment. More universities will be added to the list over time. According to the a-index, ETH Zurich possesses the hardest PhD admission process with an a-index of 98.

Table 1. world university rankings based on their a-index.

Rank	University/Institute Name	Country	a-index
1	ETH Zurich	Switzerland	98
2	Stanford University	USA	97.3
3	University of Cambridge	England	97
4	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	USA	96.6
5	California Institute of Technology (Caltech)	USA	96.2
6	University of Oxford	England	96
7	Harvard University	USA	95.7
8	National University of Singapore (NUS)	Singapore	95.2
9	Princton University	USA	95
10	Imperial College London	England	94.4
11	EPFL	Switzerland	94.1
12	University of Pennsylvania	USA	93.5
13	University College London	England	93
14	Nanyang Technological University (NTU)	Singapore	92.3
15	Yale University	USA	91.9
16	University of California, Berkeley	USA	91.4
17	University of Toronto	Canada	91
18	Northwestern University	USA	90.8
19	Australian National University (ANU)	Australia	90.2
20	University of Michigan – Ann Arbor	USA	89.5
21	Cornell University	USA	89
22	New York University (NYU)	USA	88.6
23	The University of Edinburgh	Scotland	88.3
24	Seoul National University	South Korea	87.8
25	UNSW Sydney	Australia	87.2
26	Tsinghua University	China	86.5
27	The University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong	86
28	Monash University	Australia	85.8
29	University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)	USA	85.4
30	King’s College London	England	85.1
31	Duke University	USA	84.3
32	The University of Sydney	Australia	84
33	The University of Manchester	England	83.6
34	Zhejiang University	China	83.1
35	Université PSL	France	82.7
36	Carnegie Mellon University	USA	81.9
37	Peking University	China	81.4
38	Johns Hopkins University	USA	80.7
39	Fudan University	China	80
40	Technical University of Munich	Germany	79.5
41	The University of Melbourne	Australia	77
42	McGill University	Canada	76.3
43	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	China	75.8
44	The University of Tokyo	Japan	75.2
45	Sorbonne University	France	74.9
46	University of California, San Diego (UCSD)	USA	74
47	Delft University of Technology	Netherlands	73.1
48	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	Hong Kong	72.4
49	Kyoto University	Japan	71.2
50	University of British Columbia	Canada	70