There are not much changes in the ratings since last year 2020, partly because they use two years of evaluation. However, rankings even with close ratings, are probably important to leading universities, even though they don’t admit many of their applicants. The other phenomena, is that The Times has extended the totality of universities ranked from 1,000 to 1,500. This moves some lower rated universities further down. The rating categories and weights are explained in the previous article.
The rankings are based on the overall combined rating. This was in the last column of the previous article on 2020, but we now move it to the first rating column, since it is the most relevant.
The columns in the table are: Rank, Institution (Inst), Overall score (Over), Teaching (T), Research (R), Citations (C), Industry Income (Ind), and International outlook (Int).
| Rank | Inst | Over | T | R | C | Ind | Int |
| 1 | Oxford | 95.6 | |||||
| 2 | Stanford | 94.9 | 92.2 | 96.7 | 99.9 | 90.1 | 79.5 |
| 3 | Harvard | 94.8 | |||||
| 4 | CalTech | 94.5 | 92.5 | 96.9 | 97.0 | 92.7 | 83.6 |
| 5 | MIT | 94.4 | |||||
| 6 | Cambridge | 94.0 | |||||
| 7 | UC Berkeley | 92.2 | 85.8 | 97.2 | 99.1 | 84.3 | 72.3 |
| 8 | Yale | 91.6 | |||||
| 9 | Princeton | 91.5 | |||||
| 10 | U. Chicago | 90.3 | |||||
| 15 | UCLA | 87.1 | 82.5 | 90.2 | 96.5 | 57.6 | 65.3 |
| 33 | UCSD | 77.7 | 60.3 | 80.4 | 94.3 | 95.6 | 64.4 |
| 53 | USC | 70.4 | 63.8 | 58.4 | 93.1 | 39.2 | 64.9 |
| 64 | UC Davis | 68.9 | 60.5 | 66.2 | 81.9 | 50.4 | 66.9 |
| 68 | UCSB | 67.9 | 45.8 | 59.6 | 96.7 | 81.8 | 70.0 |
| 98 | UC Irvine | 62.1 | 43.5 | 47.5 | 93.5 | 53.2 | 72.4 |
| 201-250 | UCSC | 50.6-54.2 | 31.4 | 31.9 | 96.2 | 38.9 | 63.6 |
| 251-300 | UC Riverside | 48.0-50.5 | 31.2 | 30.3 | 85.0 | 37.5 | 65.7 |
| 301-350 | UC Merced | 45.6-47.9 | 21.6 | 23.0 | 95.2 | 38.8 | 43.9 |
