Top 10 Places to Study Abroad 2026 - Rankings Rationale

Wondering how we came up with the Top 10 Rankings 2026? We'll break down the process and factors here for you.

Dec 3, 2025

Top 10 Places to Study Abroad 2026 - Rankings Rationale

At educations.com, we're dedicated to helping students around the world find the right education for their needs. We understand that international students have unique considerations when selecting a university and program. That's why we're making our annual rankings of the Top 10 Places to Study Abroad to help them discover their ideal study abroad destination!

In 2025, we conducted a survey* of nearly 42,000 students from more than 200+ countries and asked about their top reasons for studying abroad. This resulted in a list of factors they considered most important, and we use these factors to form our rankings**.

This is the 7th annual ranking we have published. To compare how the importance of the factors (and the factors themselves) has changed since last year, check the 2025 rankings and rationale page.

For all lists these 5 factors are:

To access higher-quality teaching
To achieve my career goals
To experience a new culture or lifestyle
To develop myself personally
To have an adventure

We assigned each factor a quantitative metric (or weight) based on the percentage of students who considered it important in their decision-making process. For instance, 7.51% of the answers indicated that culture and lifestyle are important when choosing a study destination. Therefore, the "to experience a new culture/lifestyle" factor accounts for 7.51% of each country's overall score.

For the field- and citizenship-specific rankings, we've filtered the responses by students' desired field of study and country of residence.

Each factor's score consists of sub-scores derived from external data sources listed below. These sub-scores were averaged and summed to generate a final score for each factor.

Factors were weighted and combined to create a final score for each country. The countries with the highest final scores make up the top 10 for each list.

Data sources and score weighting

1. To access higher-quality teaching

Score weighting:

General: 47.46%
MBA: 44.93%
Law: 47.32%
Medicine: 48.06%
For Indian students: 46.62%
For US students: 46.21%

Data sources:

2. To achieve my career goals

Score weighting:

General: 31.23%
MBA: 32.37%
Law: 31.47%
Medicine: 32.38%
For Indian students: 32.61%
For US students: 30.3%

Data sources:

3. To experience a new culture or lifestyle

Score weighting:

General: 7.51%
MBA: 7.97%
Law: 7.93%
Medicine: 7.04%
For Indian students: 7%
For US students: 6.06%

Data sources:

4. To develop myself personally

Score weighting:

General: 5.81%
MBA: 6.28%
Law: 5.83%
Medicine: 5.34%
For Indian students: 6.04%
For US students: 6.57%

Data sources:

Score weighting:

General: 7.99%
MBA: 8.45%
Law: 7.46%
Medicine: 7.28%
For Indian students: 7.73%
For US students: 10.86%

Data sources:

*State of Student Recruitment survey conducted in 2025

**The analysis for the rankings takes into consideration our data, external data sources, and current international world affairs where relevant

educations.com teamAuthor

The educations.com team consists of hundreds of dedicated individuals who share a passion for studying abroad. We combine our diverse strengths to guide millions of students in over 250 countries toward finding their dream education.

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