Mapping the World’s Knowledge Hubs

The global economy is increasingly powered by innovation and knowledge, and great universities are a key source of those, functioning as catalysts of the knowledge economy. Leading-edge universities form the axis of tech hubs like the Bay Area (Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the University of California at San Francisco), the Cambridge-Boston region (MIT and Harvard), and a regenerating Pittsburgh (Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh).

But what are the world’s leading centers for university knowledge?

To dig into this, my Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) team charted the geography of the world’s 500 leading universities based on the latest 2016-2017 Times Higher Education World University Rankings. (Compare this to what we did last semester when we covered the the geography of American college towns.)

The map above shows the locations of the top 100 universities in the world, while the table below lists out the top 20 metros. Note the huge concentration of leading universities in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, with a sprinkling in Asia and Australia. There are virtually no leading universities in big parts of the Global South, including Africa and South America, or in much of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Tied for first place are London and Los Angeles, each with four universities in the top 100. Next is a three-way tie: Boston-Cambridge, Hong Kong, and Berlin all have three universities in the top 100. Another 14 metros feature two top universities each: Beijing, New York, Chicago, Singapore, Atlanta, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, Stockholm, Munich, Liège, The Hague, Durham-Chapel Hill, and Utrecht.

London now tops the list with 15 universities among the top 500. This does not include nearby Oxford and Cambridge, which host the first and fourth leading universities, respectively.

Paris is second, with 12 high-ranking universities. Seoul is third, with eight of the top 500 institutions. Three metros have seven leading universities each: New York, Boston-Cambridge, and Melbourne.

Another five metros are tied with five schools each: Washington, D.C.; Chicago, Tokyo; Stockholm; and Sydney. There are nine metros with four: Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Dublin, Copenhagen, Milan, Barcelona, Philadelphia, Moscow, Brussels, Liège, and Los Angeles.

Another 13 metros have three of the top 500 universities; 47 have two, and 261 have one.

But bigger metros will have higher numbers of global universities based on their sheer size. The last map shows the distribution of the top 500 universities per million people.

Obviously, this would mean that smaller metros—especially U.S. towns with one great university—would rise to the top. To control for this, the table below limits the analysis to global metros with at least five leading universities.

Now Stockholm rises to the top, followed by Melbourne, Boston-Cambridge, London, and Sydney. Paris; Washington, D.C.; Hong Kong; Seoul; Chicago; New York; and Tokyo round out the list.

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The geography of leading universities is extremely spiky. It is highly clustered and concentrated in economically powerful metros and mega-regions, such as the Boston-New York-Washington corridor; Northern and Southern California; the “Chi-Pitts” mega-region (or Great Lakes Megalopolis) in the United States; Greater London, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, and a few other centers in Western Europe; Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Seoul in Asia; and Sydney and Melbourne in Australia.

Large swaths of the Global South, as well as huge spans of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia—and notably, the BRIC nations (Brazil, India, Russia, and China)—have a negligible concentration of preeminent universities. For this reason, these places continue to export their talent to the world’s leading knowledge clusters.  

In this increasingly spiky world, not only does the economic divide separating the world’s leading cities and metro regions from the rest continue to widen, the gap in knowledge generation and talent attraction—two critical functions of top universities—grows wider still.