The sixth edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject, recently released on TopUniversities.com, features a record-breaking 42 disciplines, making it the largest-ever ranking of its kind. The Colorado School of Mines has been ranked as the world’s best university for the study of mineral and mining engineering, in what is the first-ever global ranking for this subject.

The expert opinion of 76,798 academics and 44,426 employers informed the results, alongside the analysis of 28.5 million research papers and over 113 million citations sourced from the Scopus/Elsevier bibliometric database. This contributed to QS evaluating 713 institutions worldwide that provide a degree in mineral/mining engineering, internally ranking 403 of these based on the data received, before publishing the world’s top 100 institutions in the final rankings.

MIT ranks second for mining engineering. Completing the top three is Stanford University.

This year’s Mining Engineering ranking features the world’s top 100 places to study the subject. The most-featured country in the ranking is the U.S. which takes six of the top-20 places, and 24 places overall — nearly one-quarter. The Universities of Cambridge and Oxford are also in the top five.

The best university for the subject outside the U.S. and U.K. is Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, which ranks 8th worldwide. It is closely followed by the University of Hong Kong, which is 9th. Australia is represented in the top 10 by the University of Queensland, which ranks joint 10th with Japan’s university of Tokyo. Latin America’s strongest university for the study of Mineral and Mining Engineering is the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), which ranks 36th.

QS World University Mining Engineering  Rankings (Top 10):

1.       Colorado School of Mines, United States

2.       Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States

3.       Stanford University, United States

4.       University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

5.       University of Oxford, United Kingdom

6.       University of California, Berkeley (UCB), United States

7.       Imperial College London, United Kingdom

8.       ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Switzerland

9.       University of Hong Kong (HKU), Hong Kong

10.   The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia and The University of Tokyo, Japan