An average of 2 million U.S. high school graduates will enroll in higher education institutions. With so many options, finding the right school can often prove a challenge.

There is no shortage of lists and rankings determining which colleges and universities are the best in the U.S. The factors for such lists involve majors and fields of study, along with cost, quality of education, overall student happiness, and more.

Academic Influence, a college rankings system that relies heavily on big data, recently released its list of top influential colleges and universities for in-person attendance from around the world.

The lists are based on “where the most influential professors are teaching and whether their graduates are themselves advancing the school’s reputation for academic excellence in their fields of study.”

“These institutions of higher learning continue to have a global and national impact due to the standout quality of their faculty, staff, and alumni,” said Dr. Jed Macosko, academic director of AcademicInfluence.com and Wake Forest University professor of physics.

Academic Influence created their list by using machine-learning tech, InfluenceRanking Engine, which measures each higher education institution’s influence by looking at its students, faculty, staff, and alumni. The data analyzed was from Wikipedia, Crossref, and Semantic Scholar.

With this data, the institution determined the top 25 most influential colleges and universities in the world, including California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Harvard University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The London School of Economics and Political Science, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

It also includes Moscow State University, New York University (NYU), Paris-Saclay University, Paris Sciences et Lettres University, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Cambridge, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, University of Tokyo, University of Toronto, and Yale University.

“Students who want to change the world can start with an education at any one of these top schools,” Dr. Macosko added.

In total, there are 1,392 colleges and universities in the U.S. that meet the criteria for Academic Influence — 637 are public institutions and 755 are private. Globally, there are 19,775 schools that fit the criteria, with the top 100 featured.

Of the countries with the most top tier schools, the U.S. has 45 in the top 100, while Israel and Switzerland have the most top-tiered schools per capita. Institutions based in Japan and China scored high on the list as well.

The Los Angeles metro area and London are the top two city hubs for top-tier higher education, placed equally. Paris is the hub of French higher education, with many of France's top universities located there.

Along with Los Angeles, the cities of New York, Boston, and Chicago are also hubs of higher education in the U.S.

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