Philosophy department drops to third in QS World Universities rankings

Pitt’s Department of Philosophy has been bumped out of the top spot in the annual QS World Universities Rankings by Subject, which were released earlier this month.

After coming in at No. 1 since 2016, Pitt Philosophy dropped to third behind New York University and Rutgers University, which ranked second and third in 2019 and 2018. Rounding out the top five were University of Oxford in England and Harvard.

Pitt also ranked near the top in:

Nursing: 16 (out of 100 programs rated)

Library & Information Management: 17 (out of 50)

Pharmacy/pharmacology: 45 (out of 300)

Medicine: 48 (out of 600)

Overall, Pitt ranked 140th, a slight drop from last year’s 138th. Overall rankings in other categories — out of roughly 500 schools rated in each area — included:

Life Sciences and Medicine: 48

Arts & Humanities: 128

Natural Sciences: 216

Social Sciences and Management: 247

Engineering: 251

Subjects where Pitt ranked in the top 100 included: Psychology (out of 301)

Subjects where Pitt ranked in the top 150 included: Archaeology (out of 200); Biological Sciences (out of 600); Education (out of 302) and Politics & International Studies (out of 200).

Subjects where Pitt ranked in the top 200 included: English Language & Literature (out of 301); Computer Science & Information Systems (out of 601); Chemical Engineering (out of 401); Chemistry (out of 601); Materials Science (out of 400); and Economics (out of 500).

Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the top school in a dozen subjects. Also ranking at or near the top in several areas were Harvard, University of Oxford and Stanford. Find the full rankings on the QS Top Universities website.

The QS World University report ranks the world’s top universities in 48 individual subject areas. Each of the subject rankings is compiled using four sources. The first two are QS’s global surveys of academics and employers, which are used to assess institutions’ international reputation in each subject. The second two indicators assess research impact, based on research citations per paper and h-index in the relevant subject as reported in Elsevier’s Scopus database.

— Susan Jones