UBC ranked among world's 40 best universities

The University of British Columbia campus is seen in this aerial shot. (UBC)

An annual ranking by a higher education consultancy has improved its outlook on the University of British Columbia, bumping the school on the west side of Vancouver up eight spots, from 43rd in the world last year to 35th in 2019.

It’s one of only two Canadian universities that made the top 50 world rankings; the University of Toronto was ranked 24th overall, down one spot from the year before.

The universities of McGill in Montreal, and McMaster in Hamilton tied for 90th overall.

The 2019 Academic Ranking of World Universities is released each year by ShanghaiRanking Consultancy, an independent organization that says on its website it's dedicated to “research on higher education intelligence and consultation.” This is the 10th year it has been the “official publisher” of the Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Eight of the top 10 universities on the list are American, including Harvard, which topped the list for the 17th straight year. Stanford, and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, rounded out the top three.

The consultancy says their ranking system uses six “objective indicators” to rank the globe’s places of higher learning, including award-winning alumni and staff, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science and per capita performance.

ShanghaiRanking says roughly 1,800 universities are ranked every year, and it publishes the top 1,000.

The full list and methodology can be found here.