Best universities for computer science degrees 2018

Find the best universities for computer science using Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings data

October 17 2017

Studying computer science is a smart bet in today’s world; the career opportunities for tech-savvy graduates are expanding every year.

There’s also an extensive choice of universities when it comes to deciding where to study computer science.

Some 300 schools feature in the 2018 ranking for computer science by Times Higher Education this year.

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Nearly a quarter of the featured universities are American colleges and almost half the universities are based in Europe. Nearly 40 of the top 300 universities are Asian institutions.

Computer science degrees vary in terms of their focus and specialisms. Some courses are more theoretical and some more focused on programming.

The ranking uses the same methodology as the World University Rankings, but with slightly higher weighting given to the innovation metric and lower weighting for citations. The full methodology can be found here.

Scroll down to find out what you can do with a computer science degree.

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Top 5 universities for computer science

1. Stanford University

The Stanford University computer science department was established in 1965. The department offers bachelor's of science, master's of science and a doctor of philosophy.

The department undertakes research in many areas including artificial intelligence, robotics, foundations of computer science, scientific computing, and programming systems. There is also a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary research across chemistry, genetics, linguistics, construction and medicine among others.

The home of the computer science department is the Gates Computer Science building, named after Bill Gates who donated $6 million to the project.

2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The department of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT confidently declares "our students change the world".

Many of its alumni feature in lists of influential entrepreneurs who are making changes at home and abroad.

Students are encouraged to develop start-ups and research projects have explored problems such as calculating the financial risks of renewable energy and developing faster parallel computing.

Undergraduates are enrolled on a flexible curriculum that allows them to focus on both abstract theory and practical problems in computer science. Students can major in computer science or both computer science and molecular biology.

Graduates go on to design video games, work on supercomputers, research robotics and often join big companies such as Google and Microsoft.

3. University of Oxford

Although computer science is a relatively modern discipline, the University of Oxford has one of the oldest departments in the country, formerly known as the Oxford University Computing Laboratory.

Since its beginnings, the department has provided lecturers for undergraduates and trained research students at a postgraduate level.

In addition to core computer science topics, students can take courses in computational biology, quantum computing, information systems, software verification, software engineering and computational linguistics.

Three undergraduate degrees are offered by the department: single honours computer science, maths and computer science, and computer science and philosophy.

Like students of other subjects, computer science students – whether undergraduate or postgraduate – belong to one of Oxford's colleges where they have the option to eat, socialise, study and live.

4. ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

ETH Zurich has a history of developing software and designing computer systems. Eventually these projects called for a dedicated computer science department, which was formed in 1981.

The department covers many areas of computer science, including computational intelligence, networks and distributed systems, algorithms and theory and information security. Different programming languages are also taught in software engineering courses.

There are close relationships with other departments within the university and with partners in business and industry, such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, SAP and Disney, with whom the university collaborates on research projects.

ETH Zurich dates back to 1855, just a few years after the formation of the federal state of Switzerland. It was created as a centre for scientific knowledge and innovation and remains a top institution for a range of subjects.

5. University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge Computer Science department offers the Computer Science Tripos course for undergraduate students which is a three- or four-year computer science course.

The university also offers an MPhil in computer science as a general master's degree which helps prepare students for a PhD in computer science.

There are many research groups based in the computer science department looking at artificial intelligence, security, graphics and interaction and computer architecture.

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Best universities for computer science 2018

Click each institution to view its World University Ranking 2018 profile

Computer Science Rank 2018	University	Country
1	Stanford University	United States
2	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States
3	University of Oxford	United Kingdom
4	ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich	Switzerland
5	University of Cambridge	United Kingdom
=6	California Institute of Technology	United States
=6	Carnegie Mellon University	United States
8	Georgia Institute of Technology	United States
9	Imperial College London	United Kingdom
10	École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne	Switzerland
11	Harvard University	United States
12	Princeton University	United States
13	National University of Singapore	Singapore
14	University of Edinburgh	United Kingdom
15	Cornell University	United States
16	Technical University of Munich	Germany
17	University of Washington	United States
18	University College London	United Kingdom
19	Columbia University	United States
20	Tsinghua University	China
21	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	United States
22	University of Toronto	Canada
23	University of Pennsylvania	United States
24	University of California, San Diego	United States
25	Peking University	China
26	University of Texas at Austin	United States
27	University of Wisconsin-Madison	United States
=28	University of British Columbia	Canada
=28	Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	Hong Kong
30	University of Southern California	United States
31	Nanyang Technological University	Singapore
32	University of Maryland, College Park	United States
33	University of Waterloo	Canada
34	University of Chicago	United States
35	University of Tokyo	Japan
36	Karlsruhe Institute of Technology	Germany
37	RWTH Aachen University	Germany
38	Chinese University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
39	University of Melbourne	Australia
40	Seoul National University	South Korea
41	Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)	South Korea
=42	Delft University of Technology	Netherlands
=42	Technical University of Berlin	Germany
44	University of California, Santa Barbara	United States
=45	University of Massachusetts	United States
=45	Zhejiang University	China
47	LMU Munich	Germany
48	Brown University	United States
49	University of California, Irvine	United States
50	KU Leuven	Belgium
51	Kyoto University	Japan
52	Rice University	United States
53	National Taiwan University	Taiwan
54	KTH Royal Institute of Technology	Sweden
55	University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
56	University of Montreal	Canada
57	Technion Israel Institute of Technology	Israel
=58	University of Freiburg	Germany
=58	Nanjing University	China
60	Lomonosov Moscow State University	Russian Federation
=61	King’s College London	United Kingdom
=61	Vienna University of Technology	Austria
63	University of Manchester	United Kingdom
64	Eindhoven University of Technology	Netherlands
65	Heidelberg University	Germany
66	University of Amsterdam	Netherlands
67	Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology	Russian Federation
=68	Pennsylvania State University	United States
=68	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	China
70	École Polytechnique	France
71	University of Science and Technology of China	China
=72	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	United States
=72	Technical University of Darmstadt	Germany
=74	City University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
=74	University of Twente	Netherlands
76	ITMO University	Russian Federation
77	Paris Sciences et Lettres – PSL Research University Paris	France
78	University of Luxembourg	Luxembourg
79	Arizona State University	United States
80	Aarhus University	Denmark
=81	University of Bonn	Germany
=81	University of Stuttgart	Germany
=83	Australian National University	Australia
=83	University of Technology Sydney	Australia
85	University of Southampton	United Kingdom
=86	University of Geneva	Switzerland
=86	University of Pittsburgh	United States
=88	Hong Kong Polytechnic University	Hong Kong
=88	Tel Aviv University	Israel
90	Aalto University	Finland
91	Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey	United States
92	Dartmouth College	United States
93	University of Helsinki	Finland
94	Stony Brook University	United States
=95	McGill University	Canada
=95	Polytechnic University of Milan	Italy
97	University of Minnesota	United States
=98	Newcastle University	United Kingdom
=98	Queensland University of Technology	Australia
100	Washington University in St Louis	United States