NUS rivals Harvard, NTU tracks Yale, among global employers

Singapore schools rank among the world’s best in preparing graduates for employment

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What is your degree worth in real life? Much of it depends on the school you finished at. While textbook knowledge in a particular subject is quite the same no matter where you study, the environment and the preparation you receive for your future workplace are part of the reason why some universities are considered elite while others are not.

In order to find out what employers think about graduates and their education, the publisher of one of the world’s leading university rankings, Times Higher Education, partners with French HR consultancy Emerging each year to survey thousands of them.

The results are published as the Global Employability Ranking, which was just updated for 2026.

Global University Employability Ranking 2026

The methodology is quite simple:

Every year, Emerging asks thousands of employers worldwide a simple but decisive question: “Which universities and schools do you believe best prepare graduates for employability and future challenges, and why?”

12,350 respondents from 32 countries were surveyed this year, providing between 10 and 15 votes for select schools from a pool of approximately 1,000 universities. Each vote has to carry a justification based on up to two out of seven employability drivers:

1. Focus on Work Expertise
2. Graduate Skills
3. Specialisation
4. Social Impact and Leadership
5. Academic Performance
6. Internationality
7. Reputation

To avoid national or regional biases, the pool of participants represents a healthy mix of all continents, as well as industries, business roles, and company sizes.

Once the opinions are collected, reviewed, and quantified, the final ranking is produced, showing which schools are considered to be producing the most employable graduates in the world.

Here’s the list for 2026, with Singapore represented by the National University of Singapore in the global Top 10 (in 8th) and NTU jumping 10 places to 23rd.

University	Global Employability Rank 2026	Change from 2025
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	1	0
Stanford University	2	+1
California Institute of Technology	3	-1
University of Cambridge	4	+1
University of Oxford	5	+2
University of California, Berkeley	6	+10
Harvard University	7	-3
National University of Singapore	8	+1
Imperial College London	9	+1
ETH Zurich	10	+7
The University of Tokyo	11	-3
Peking University	12	-1
Technical University of Munich	13	0
Princeton University	14	-8
Carnegie Mellon University	15	+6
Tsinghua University	16	+3
IE University	17	+1
Columbia University	18	-3
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)	19	+4
University of Toronto	20	-6
HEC Paris	21	+1
Yale University	22	-10
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore	23	+10
CentraleSupélec – Université Paris-Saclay	24	-4
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	25	-1

Both schools significantly outrank their positions on Times Higher Education’s own list (NUS in 17th and NTU 31st), and are going head to head against some of the biggest brands in academia, as NUS is just one spot behind Harvard and NTU is on the heels of Yale, in the eyes of international recruiters.

As it turns out, then, employers think more highly of them—and their graduates—than synthetic academic comparisons would suggest.

What’s more, Singapore is in an exclusive club here, as only three other countries have made it to the Top 10: the US, the UK, and Switzerland.

NUS is likely near the peak of its potential rank, given the names with centuries of history behind them it competes with—but let’s be honest, being mentioned in the same breath is an astonishing achievement already. We can now only hope NTU jumps those last few places too and joins its sibling among the absolute best.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s current affairs here.

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