The Forbes list includes state-accredited universities with Bachelor’s or Specialists’s programs and at least 400 students. Universities were evaluated with the following criteria: quality of networking (USE scores and percentage of contest winners), employer reputation (based on the survey of 200 companies from Forbes’ list), international reputation (positions in global rankings, e.g. Shanghai Ranking), academic environment (employer qualifications, internationalization level, financial standing, etc.), and number of graduates in the Forbes Russia billionaires list.
In 2026, ITMO improved its last year’s performance, climbing from the 7th to 4th place nationwide and from the second to the first among St. Petersburg-based universities. Such a success was possible due to the university’s systemic transformation into a research, educational, and technological corporation held within the Priority 2030 national program. Last year, ITMO topped the program’s high-performers list and received around 1 billion rubles for its implementation. Funding will proceed in 2026: about 400 million rubles are allocated for the strategy’s development, including its projects in the field of AI.
Another critical success factor is the development of research infrastructure and extended collaborations with industrial partners. As of now, the university has joint research centers and laboratories with such tech giants as: Sberbank, Yandex, VK, Gazprom Neft, Tatneft, Rosatom, Rostec, Roscosmos, BIOCAD, and others.
ITMO is also ranked first in training software developers, second for IT graduates’ net income, and is a top-three university in AI training.
