There are many definitions of success in Model UN, and awards are only one extrinsic way of measuring success. Nevertheless, awards serve to recognize both individual students and college teams as a whole for their accomplishments in leadership, research, public speaking, resolution-building, negotiation, and diplomacy.
Every year, the College MUN rankings celebrate the MUN teams that showed immense resilience by not only enduring despite the year’s challenges, but also succeeding at the highest level possible in collegiate Model UN.
Methodology
The World Division refers to the circuit of collegiate Model UN teams that are primarily run by college Head Delegates and primarily attend conferences hosted by college Model UN organizations, with the vast majority of those conferences featuring crisis committees. This ranking is only for the World Division.
The World Division Rankings uses a Cumulative Weighted Score Methodology. The Weighted Score Methodology is the same since Fall 2018 with modifications in conference weightings to reflect attendance and competitiveness this year. Conferences included in the calculations are listed below and grouped with their approximate peer conferences in terms of ranking. Awards data were provided by the conferences, and we could only use conferences that chose to provide data. We did our best to reach out to all conferences; any conferences without data can be included in the Final rankings.
Awards Data is through McMUN. Due to the rebalancing of conference schedules over the years, it made more sense to roughly divide the season’s worth of weighted points after McMUN than before it. This also enabled our team time to gather all the awards data.
Tiers change every year based on data and are as follows for the available Fall conferences:
| McMUN |
| NCSC |
| BarMUN |
| TrojanMUN, UPMUNC, UNCMUNC |
| DawgMUN, SBIMUN, MUNE, 305MUN |
| CMUNNY, TennMUN, CIAC, AIRMUNC, RISC |
Credits:
Thank you to all the conferences for submitting their awards data, and to the various teams reaching out with interest in seeing this article published. Thank you to Senthil Meyyappan for helping with the outreach. Credit also goes to Barstool MUN for staying up to the date with the latest conferences.
American University
Top 25 Teams
- American University
- Georgetown University
- Florida International University
- Claremont McKenna College
- Boston University
- University of California, Berkeley
- Harvard University
- University of Miami
- University of Florida
- University of Chicago
- The George Washington University
- Fordham University
- University of California, Los Angeles
- University of Virginia
- United States Military Academy at West Point
- Concordia University
- McGill University
- University of Georgia
- University of Southern California
- Florida State University
- New York University
- Indiana University
- The Johns Hopkins University
- University of Central Florida
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
American University was once again dominant on the circuit with the most individual awards, gavels, and delegation awards so far. But overall, the Top 25 is filled with teams that are traditionally near the top of the rankings, such as Georgetown and FIU.
There seemed to be geographically balanced sets of strong teams from the regions that traditionally produced top MUN teams: Washington DC (DMV), Boston, California, Florida, and Canada. The one region that hasn’t rebounded as much is the NY/NJ region, and that reflects with that region having the lowest weighted conferences.
The rise of the Southern conference circuit hosting 6 of the 15 Fall Conferences has benefited teams from that region, with eight teams from Southern states being ranked including first-time entrant UCF (giving the state of Florida five ranked teams) and UNC Chapel Hill (which last made the Final Top 25 in 2015-2016). FIU, Miami, and Florida are all in the Top 10. Miami and Florida would both have their highest Final ranking ever if they are able to hold the position over the Spring.
Other notable individual team placements: UChicago is the only team in the 14-year history of the rankings to have always been in the Final Top 5, and it is currently in the Top 10. Fordham is notably outperforming its first-time ranking last year. Georgia, NYU, Indiana, and Johns Hopkins have all been in the Final Top 25 in the past year or two, and will try to build on their Fall Top 25 to stay in the Final ranking this year.
**
Top 50 (alphabetical order):
The next five closest teams were: Cincinnati, Queen’s, Northwestern, UC Santa Barbara, and Emory.
| Brown University |
| Clark University |
| College of William & Mary |
| Emory University |
| Northeastern University |
| Northwestern University |
| Pepperdine University |
| Queen’s University |
| Rutgers University |
| Stanford University |
| The Ohio State University |
| University of Alabama |
| University of California, San Diego |
| University of California, Santa Barbara |
| University of California, Santa Cruz |
| University of Cincinnati |
| University of Maryland |
| University of Michigan |
| University of North Carolina, Charlotte |
| University of Notre Dame |
| University of Pennsylvania |
| University of South Florida |
| University of Tennessee, Knoxville |
| Virginia Tech |
| Yale University |
**
Top 75 (alphabetical order):
| Champlain College St-Lambert |
| Colorado College |
| Columbia University |
| Cornell University |
| Duke University |
| Elon University |
| Embry Riddle Aeronautical University |
| Emmanuel College |
| Fordham University at Lincoln Center |
| Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Michigan State University |
| Northern Arizona University |
| Old Dominion University |
| Pomona College |
| Princeton University |
| Temple University |
| Toronto Metropolitan University |
| University of California, Davis |
| University of California, Irvine |
| University of New Mexico |
| University of San Francisco |
| University of South Carolina |
| University of Wisconsin-Madison |
| Wellesley College |
| York University |
**
Top 100 (alphabetical order):
| Carnegie Mellon University |
| Case Western Reserve University |
| Colgate University |
| Collège Brébeuf |
| Flagler College |
| Howard University |
| John Abbott College |
| Loyola Marymount University |
| Mount Holyoke |
| Occidental College |
| Ohio Wesleyan University |
| Rollins College |
| Seton Hall University |
| Simmons University |
| State University of New York, Geneseo |
| The Pennsylvania State University |
| United States Air Force Academy |
| University of British Columbia |
| University of Massachusetts, Boston |
| University of Nevada, Las Vegas |
| University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill |
| University of Southern Maine |
| University of Utah |
| Vanderbilt University |
| Washington University in St. Louis |
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Congratulations to all the teams! Good luck with the Spring conferences! We’ll aim to get the rankings out sooner as well if we can get all the data in time!