Ranking

Ranking of the University of the People UoPeople

Being nothing more than a hidden PO box in California, University of the People is not recognized as a legitimate university by any respected international rankings. Times Higher Education World University Rankings, QS World University Rankings, Shanghai Ranking, and others have decided to remove UoPeople due to its lack of academic credibility and institutional legitimacy.

Being considered a fake college without any professors or researchers, University of the People has also been banned from the Highly Cited Researchers world ranking.

Having said that, Webometrics.info is a Spanish website that evaluates universities (including diploma mills) based on their website presence by counting the number of external and internal links, also known as the "Web impact" factor, which is the average of several factors, including "excellence" and "impact". Since UoPeople exists only as a website, Webometrics decided to include University of the People in its ranking. Some people believe that "counting links" is a strange way to assess a university, but that is another discussion. The important point is that UoPeople's 2025 "excellence" score, 7206, is the lowest, or worst, in the world and therefore in America too. Don't let UoPeople reps and spammers mislead you: its rank is not 7237 out of about 35000, which might sound impressive, especially for a diploma mill. In reality, 7237 is the lowest possible score and position, shared with all the other diploma mills and shady pseudo-schools.

On the other hand, UoPeople reps and spammers keep insisting, "No, it's not the worst score because the list includes 35000 schools in the US or worldwide, so the worst rank should be 35000." However, many schools share the same score, meaning that after removing all the duplicates, the actual number of distinct positions is around 7000. UoPeople reps and spammers like to insult our intelligence, but they don’t seem to be very good at math.

Unsurprisingly, UoPeople's "impact" score is much better at 1100. As we have seen, this simply means that the website has a high number of outbound and inbound links. Unfortunately, this ranking system also rewards spammers, who can generate thousands of links automatically and abusively.In other words, University of the People floods the internet with spam. The more fake reviews claiming that "UoPeople is the best university in the world" appear online (often with a link to uopeople.edu) the higher the ranking climbs. This explains why the University of the People has been spending so much money on SEO, generating thousands of ads, fake reviews, fake discussions, videos, emails, and more.

However, UoPeople constantly pays commercial websites and PR services to "repair its reputation", so you are likely to come across countless fabricated promotional articles, webpages, reviews, ads, and newsletters falsely claiming that UoPeople.edu's ranking is outstanding. Many of these are even generated by bots. Two notable examples are niche.com and trustpilot.com, but there are many more.

There is also a fake ranking called EduRank that promotes the University of the People as the "7274th university in the world out of 14131". Unfortunately, this ranking is completely fabricated, as it does not use any scientific methodology to compile its list. It is nothing more than an advertising page paid for by UoPeople.edu.

In any case, the concept of a "UoPeople ranking" is nothing but a bunch of hot air. The reality is that all the most important international rankings understandably refuse to consider the University of the People.

© 2016-2025 Global Watch on the University of the People Official website