Cryptocurrency exchange CoinDesk has released this year’s ranking for the Top Universities for Blockchain. While its Asian schools dominate the list, European universities improve in position.
In a blog post, the crypto platform said the National University of Singapore has claimed the top spot, followed by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, University of California Berkeley, University of Zurich and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, making up the top five.
The Singapore National University gained its top spot due to its multiple blockchain research centres, frequent blockchain-themed conferences, clubs, company partnerships and its masters programme in digital financial technology.
This year’s sample size was expanded to include 230 international schools, compared to just US schools in the ranking last year. The ranking covers cost, academic reputation, research output, campus blockchain offerings such as student clubs and research centres, courses and employment outcomes.
Three other Asian schools also made it to the top 10 — Hong Kong Polytechnic, Tsinghua University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Australia is represented by Melbourne’s RMIT, while Europe’s University of Zurich, UCL and ETH Zurich made it to the ranking.
Among US schools, Berkeley came in third and MIT fifth, while last year’s 2nd spot Cornell came in at 17, last year’s 4th place Stanford settled at 12 this year. Harvard dropped to 49 from 5th last year. The declines reflect “strong competition this time and that schools with strong overall reputations aren’t always the best performers when it comes to blockchain”, CoinDesk said.
On the average, European universities score the second highest, followed by US schools. Asian and Australian schools took the regional lead with an average scaled score of 63 points; while European universities were second with an average scaled score of 60 points, and American and Canadian schools scaled average score of 59 points, CoinDesk said.
Cost-wise, top Canadian and American blockchain schools tended to have the heftiest tuitions, averaging $52,000 per year of study. Top European blockchain schools were the second most affordable, with an average cost of $16,700 per year and schools are in Asia and Australia, with an average yearly tuition of $12,000 were the most affordable schools for blockchain.
Check the full Top 50 ranking for ‘Top Universities for Blockchain 2021’ below:
| Ranking | School | Score | |
| 1 | National University of Singapore | 100.00 | |
| 2 | Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology | 97.65 | |
| 3 | University of California Berkeley | 93.26 | |
| 4 | University of Zurich | 91.66 | |
| 5 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 91.57 | |
| 6 | Hong Kong Polytechnic University | 84.30 | |
| 7 | UCL | 81.54 | |
| 8 | Tsinghua University | 79.20 | |
| 9 | Chinese University of Hong Kong | 75.30 | |
| 10 | ETH Zurich | 75.04 | |
| 11 | Nanyang Technological University, Singapore | 74.98 | |
| 12 | Stanford University | 68.41 | |
| 13 | UNSW Sydney | 66.29 | |
| 14 | City University of Hong Kong | 66.13 | |
| 15 | University of Oxford | 65.47 | |
| 16 | Shanghai Jiao Tong University | 65.18 | |
| 17 | Cornell University | 63.98 | |
| 18 | Delft University of Technology | 63.85 | |
| 19 | University of Hong Kong | 61.97 | |
| 20 | University of Sydney | 61.48 | |
| 21 | École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) | 60.78 | |
| 22 | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | 60.10 | |
| 23 | University of Cambridge | 58.69 | |
| 24 | Hong Kong University of Science and Technology | 58.51 | |
| 25 | University of California Los Angeles | 58.40 | |
| 26 | Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology | 57.87 | |
| 27 | Sun Yat-sen University | 57.18 | |
| 28 | University of British Columbia | 55.80 | |
| 29 | Peking University | 54.15 | |
| 30 | Arizona State University | 51.86 | |
| 31 | Technical University of Munich | 51.78 | |
| 32 | University of Edinburgh | 51.77 | |
| 33 | Carnegie Mellon University | 51.10 | |
| 34 | University of Melbourne | 50.95 | |
| 35 | Worcester Polytechnic Institute | 50.77 | |
| 36 | Georgetown University | 50.40 | |
| 37 | Fudan University | 49.95 | |
| 38 | University of Southern California | 49.57 | |
| 39 | Korea University | 48.85 | |
| 40 | Imperial College London | 48.59 | |
| 41 | New York University | 48.55 | |
| 42 | Tokyo Institute of Technology | 47.37 | |
| 43 | University of Warwick | 47.19 | |
| 44 | Fordham University | 46.89 | |
| 45 | Columbia University | 46.46 | |
| 46 | Seoul National University | 45.72 | |
| 47 | King Abdulaziz University | 45.59 | |
| 48 | Monash University | 44.05 | |
| 49 | Harvard University | 43.89 | |
| 50 | Zhejiang University | 43.37 |
This is the second year CoinDesk has compiled these rankings and included 230 international schools compared to last year’s ranking of 46 US schools for the Top 30.
The study was led by Stanford and MIT researcher Reuben Youngblom and CoinDesk’s Joe Lautzenhiser, who looked at publicly available sources, including course catalogues, programme prospectuses, social media channels, club web page the Clarivate Web of Science, and devised an online survey where academics, students and stakeholders could rate the offerings at their schools and their competitors.
This year’s ranking also considered the varying cost of university education and introduced a metric that compares unsubsidised tuition costs against the average cost of living in the region of the school’s location.
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