1. Harvard University

21. City University of New York

New York City, New York, U.S.
As its name suggests, City University of New York (CUNY) has actively tried to integrate itself into arguably the world’s most-influential city. It began life in 1961 when the school combined the city’s 114-year-old municipal college system into an overarching university. Today, with 24 campuses, 6,700 full-time faculty, more than 10,000 part-time faculty, and roughly 273,000 students spread across a city with easy access to the United Nations, Wall Street, and a diverse cultural capital, this $3 billion — endowment university exposes its pupils to a world of opportunity. With approximately 160 centers and institutes, the school has produced a Fields Medalist, 13 Nobel laureates, and 21 MacArthur Fellows. The school is also associated with many famous individuals, such as the political figures Secretary of State General Colin Powell and Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the scientist Charlotte Friend, discoverer of the Friend leukemia virus, and the inventor Eli Friedman, developer of the portable dialysis machine.

Featured Online Colleges

22. University of Vienna

Vienna, Austria
Founded in 1365 by Rudolph IV, Duke of Austria, the University of Vienna is one of the oldest universities in the world, and one of the most respected among the German-speaking peoples. Over its six-and-a-half-century existence, it has grown large enough to serve 94,000 students, about a third of whom are international students from over 140 different nations. It offers 174 different degree programs and about 40 continuing education programs. The university also benefits from its location: It is spread across 70 different venues intertwined throughout the Austrian capital. The school has produced 15 Nobel Prizes and maintains a library that houses well over seven million volumes. Not surprisingly, the University of Vienna is the largest university in Austria. Famous alumni and professors include Protestant reformer Huldrych Zwingli; physicists Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, Paul Ehrenfest, Erwin Schrödinger, and Lise Meitner; philosophers Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, and the “Vienna Circle” (Moritz Schlick, Rudolph Carnap, Otto Neurath, and Karl Popper, among others); mathematician Kurt Gödel; psychologists Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich; writers Adalbert Stifter, Stefan Zweig, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Arthur Schnitzler; composer Gustav Mahler; and the economists now known as the “Austrian School of Economics” (principally Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich A. Hayek), as well as Joseph Schumpeter.