US and UK universities top world rankings
American and British universities continue to dominate in the global rankings, with the next best faculty in a EU member state trailing a distant 24.
The findings, published on Tuesday (16 September), by the London-based education firm QS, assessed the performance of 3,000 universities world-wide.
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“For the 2014/15 edition, the rankings draw on almost 63,700 responses from academics worldwide, collated over three years,” notes QS.
At the top of the best 100 for the third year in a row is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Tied in close second are the UK’s University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, followed by the US-based Harvard University at third.
The top 10 universities are either based in the US or in the UK.
With the exception of two Swiss-based universities and one in Canada, the Americans and the Brits also rule the top 20 overall.
France tops continental Europe
The next top performer in terms of an EU member state is the Paris-based Ecole normale superieure coming in at 24.
Founded in 1794, the French university ranks first in France and on the whole of continental Europe. Alumni include Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Louis Pasteur, Paul Langevin and Laurent Schwartz.
France also hosts continental Europe’s second best university, the Ecole Polytechnique, which was ranked 35.
Denmark’s University of Copenhagen (45) comes in at third in continental Europe, followed by Germany’s Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg (49).
Germany also hosts some of the worst performers in EU in QS’s ranking of 400.
Germany’s Universität Jena placed at the bottom with 397, followed by Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel at 396, and the Universität Regensburg at 395.
The top four hundred are given individual ranking indicators based on research, teaching, employability and internationalisation.
The methodology includes weighing the university’s reputation, employer reputation, faculty to student ratio, citations per faculty, international student ratio, and international staff ratio.