Best University Cities 2019 for International Students

For more than a decade, we’ve been publishing the most authoritative global university league tables in the world. Now, our ranking data have been analyzed by academics at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute to find out if there are any cities where the top universities congregate.
The findings, published on The Atlantic CityLab website, produce some expected and some not-so-expected results. If you were asked to name the best student cities in the world, you might think of the likes of London and New York.
But would Atlanta or Seoul be on your “top student cities” list? If not, you may well want to reconsider. They have some of the highest concentrations of great universities in the world – so if your idea of being in one of the best student cities involves being close to thousands of other smart undergraduates (and postgrads, for that matter) then you might be about to broaden your search.
First, the MP Institute analysis looked at the world’s top 100 universities, as identified by THE World University Rankings. Here’s what they found.

Best University Cities: where the top 100 colleges are based

 
There are no big surprises high up. If you were to ask a panel of would-be students which cities they think are the best – and which have the best universities – you might expect to hear London, Los Angeles, Boston and Berlin mentioned.
But had you considered Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Stockholm or Beijing? What about Utrecht or Liège? They have some fantastic universities too. And some big names are missing from the list. Where’s Paris, for example?
In some cases, you’ll notice that cities have been merged together to form metropolitan areas under the name of one town. Here’s how the data scientists at the Institute worked it out.
For US universities, the researcher matched them to the city boundaries used by the US Census Bureau. For universities outside the US, universities were matched to metros using the UN World Cities boundaries. This classification covers all places with a population greater than 300,000.
For those that did not match any UN World Cities boundaries, the researchers matched them to the Brookings Institute global metro boundaries. For example, Aachen and Maastricht both mapped to Liege as they are within the Brookings Institute defined Liege metro and are both too small to register as a UN World City.
That’s the methodology stuff sorted.
If you’re still not sure about what the best city to study it is, then you’ll be pleased to hear that the researchers didn’t stop with the top 100 institutions. This next table looks at the cities with the most top 500 universities, as defined by our rankings.

Best University Cities: where the top 500 universities are based

 
Ah – there’s Paris! When you broaden the ranking to include all institutions that make the top 500, the French capital leaps into second place. We knew it was a great university city!
London still rules the roost, though, with 15 of the world’s top 500 universities falling in its boundaries. And it’s good news for those looking to study in South Korea, Australia, Japan, Belgium, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Italy or Russia too. They all have multiple universities sitting pretty in the top 500.
You could say there are still no major surprises in the two tables we’ve already looked at in this article.
Most of the towns named as being top university cities are huge global metropolises, and where you get a high concentration of people, you are bound to get great universities – after all, it’s the people within colleges that make them the great institutions that they are.
But what happens if you break down our best university cities by the number of top universities per head of population? Well, the researchers have done just that – and it’s good news for Sweden!

Best University Cities: number of top universities per capita

 
Yes, Stockholm is – by this measure – the best university city! It has a remarkable 3.4 universities for every 1 million people – comfortably more than the next challenger Melbourne, with 1.7.
The big-hitters of London, Sydney, and Paris are still in there, as are the behemoths of New York and Tokyo. But if you are looking for great university student cities without a huge population, then this table might be the one for you.