Three innovative Texas universities, including Dallas' UT Southwestern Medical Center, are soaring toward the top of the class worldwide. The Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) has ranked UT Southwestern at No. 69 in the world on its prestigious Global 2000 list for 2026.

UT Southwestern also ranks as the No. 2 university in Texas and No. 34 in the U.S.

Each year, CWUR grades more than 21,000 universities around the world based on four factors without relying on surveys and university data submissions: education (25 percent), employability (25 percent), faculty (10 percent), and research (40 percent). For the 2026 edition, 81 million outcome-based data points were analyzed for the rankings, and the schools that placed at the top made the Global 2000 list.

Here's how CWUR ranked UT Southwestern's performance across the four categories:

• No. 43 – Faculty rank
• No. 43 – Education rank
• No. 178 – Research rank
• Unranked in employability

A total of 313 universities in the U.S. made the cut, and only two other Texas universities earned spots among the top 100: The University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University in College Station. UT Austin ranked No. 1 statewide, No. 22 nationally, and No. 35 globally; and Texas A&M ranked No. 3 statewide, No. 44 nationally, and No. 91 globally.

In the past year, U.S. News and World Report, Forbes, and WalletHub, have praised the home of the Longhorns as one of the best universities in America. It's a listmaker's favorite in other global ranking reports, including those that focus on graduate schools. UT has maintained its high-ranking status in these annual rankings even as university leaders face criticism from students for closing and consolidating several programs.

These are the top 10 best universities in the world for 2026, according to CWUR:

• Harvard University
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Stanford University
• University of Cambridge
• University of Oxford
• Princeton University
• University of Pennsylvania
• Columbia University
• Yale University
• University of Chicago