UK Tops Best Art Colleges In The World QS List

RCA Graduate Show 2016

The Royal College Of Art Tops 2017 QS Best In World List in the Art & Design category. According to a recent international survey, the RCA has again been named the world’s leading art and design university. It beat out American heavyweights MIT and Parsons to take the top spot. The seventh annual QS University Rankings is a rating agency, that gathers data by linking high achievers from the graduate programmes and executive communities around the world with leading business schools, postgraduate departments at universities and with employers, through websites, events, e-guides and technical solutions.

“The RCA is highly selective, taking the world’s most talented artists and designers”

The RCA was founded in 1837 as the Government School of Design, finished with 96 points in the QS system, which measures institutions by their reputations with academics and employers. It ranks the number of international students and staff, the ratio of faculty members to students, and the number of citations referencing work by each university in research papers published within the last year.

The RCA’s alumni include some of the art and design industry’s most recognisable names including  Peter Blake, David Hockney and R B Kitaj, Gavin Turk, Tracey Emin and Jake and Dinos Chapman, among its ranks and Thomas Heatherwick and Jasper Morrison. Past teachers have included designers like Ron Arad and Tord Boontje, although the institution recently lost some of its key faculty members.

“The RCA is highly selective, taking the world’s most talented artists and designers,” said RCA rector Paul Thompson. “Those students go on to transform the world – in fine art, fashion, automotive design, and engineering. The QS ranking for Art and Design are another resounding endorsement of London’s universities, following hard on the heels of recent surveys, which place UCL, ICL, Kings, and LSE within the top tier of world ranked universities.”

This is the first edition of this international art school ranking, the top spot goes to the UK’s Royal College of Art, followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)  US’s Parsons and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). While the top 10 is dominated by art schools from the UK and US, beyond this the picture becomes much more diverse, with the ranking serving to highlight leading art and design departments across the globe.

Top 20 Art Colleges In The World

1 Royal College of Art

2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

3 Parsons School of Design at The New School

4 Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)

5 Pratt Institute

6 University of the Arts London

7 Politecnico di Milano

8 School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)

9 California Institute of the Arts

10 Stanford University

11 University of Oxford

12 Yale University

13 Aalto University

14 Carnegie Mellon University

15 Goldsmiths, University of London

16 Art Center College of Design

17 RMIT University

18 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

19 The Glasgow School of Art

20 Columbia University

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