In a new ranking of the world’s best universities, U.K.-based Times Higher Education (THE) ranked 1,904 universities located in 108 countries. U.S. universities claimed 15 of the top 25 spots in the rankings, and U.K. universities accounted for four of them. The U.K.’s University of Oxford topped the list, as it has for the past seven years.
Emphasizing Research
THE ranked the “research-intensive” schools in four areas it calls their “core missions”: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. The research mission was divided into two parts: research environment and research quality. Those two areas and the teaching mission each accounted for around 30% of a university’s total score. (These are the 50 hardest colleges and universities to get into.)
Knowledge transfer, which includes patents awarded and research income derived from industry, accounted for 4% of the overall score, and a school’s international outlook accounted for 7.5% of the score. The following THE graphic gives the percentage breakdowns. The industry column is the knowledge transfer score. The full methodology is available here.
Rankings
Only two universities, both in the United Kingdom, received perfect scores for their research environment: Oxford and Cambridge. Five of the top 25 received perfect scores in the industry category. Four are U.S.-based, and the other is in Singapore: Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Johns Hopkins, and the National University of Singapore.
Source: The Higher Education
Here are the world’s 25 best universities.
| Rank | Name | Overall | Teaching | Industry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | University of Oxford, UK | 98.5 | 96.6 | 98.7 |
| 2 | Stanford University, USA | 98.0 | 99.0 | 100.0 |
| 3 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA | 97.9 | 98.6 | 100.0 |
| 4 | Harvard University, USA | 97.8 | 97.7 | 84.2 |
| 5 | University of Cambridge, UK | 97.5 | 95.8 | 87.9 |
| 6 | Princeton University, USA | 96.9 | 96.3 | 95.1 |
| 7 | California Institute of Technology, USA | 96.5 | 96.6 | 100.0 |
| 8 | Imperial College London, UK | 95.1 | 90.9 | 90.9 |
| 9 | University of California, Berkeley, USA | 94.6 | 87.2 | 99.4 |
| 10 | Yale University, USA | 94.2 | 94.0 | 86.5 |
| 11 | ETH Zurich, Switzerland | 93.1 | 87.6 | 82.9 |
| 12 | Tsinghua University, China | 92.4 | 95.3 | 99.9 |
| 13 | The University of Chicago, USA | 92.1 | 89.6 | 93.8 |
| 14 | Peking University, China | 91.8 | 95.6 | 98.8 |
| 15 | Johns Hopkins University, USA | 91.1 | 84.4 | 100.0 |
| 16 | University of Pennsylvania, USA | 91.0 | 87.7 | 97.7 |
| 17 | Columbia University, USA | 90.9 | 88.6 | 75.2 |
| 18 | University of California, Los Angeles, USA | 90.1 | 85.7 | 92.3 |
| 19 | National University of Singapore, Singapore | 90.0 | 78.8 | 100.0 |
| 20 | Cornell University, USA | 89.5 | 85.7 | 69.4 |
| 21 | University of Toronto, Canada | 88.6 | 77.5 | 96.1 |
| 22 | University College London, UK | 88.1 | 78.4 | 75.2 |
| 23 | University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, USA | 87.4 | 84.7 | 80.7 |
| 24 | Carnegie Mellon University, USA | 86.3 | 75.0 | 87.3 |
| 25 | University of Washington, USA | 85.3 | 78.0 | 77.6 |
The full list is available here.
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