Four out of the top six universities in the world are British, according to QS.
Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) has published its 2014 international ranking of universities, which shows four out of the top six universities in the world are in the UK. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) secured the top spot for the third time.
Cambridge University and Imperial College London share second place (up from third and fourth, respectively), pushing Harvard University down from its previous second place to now fourth. The rise of Cambridge and Imperial is due to an increased amount of citations of its papers in academic journals and published research.
Sharing fifth place are Oxford University (up from sixth) and University College London (down from fourth). Stanford University stayed in seventh place, while Caltech and Princeton University rose from a previously shared tenth place to eighth and ninth place. Yale University dropped from eighth place to tenth.
The two only non-UK and non-US universities in the top 20 are ETH Zurich, which maintained 12th place, and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, which climbed from 19th to 17th place.
The ranking is updated every year, and was first made in 2004. It gives weight to several key factors. These are academic reputation (40%), faculty to student ratio (20%), citations per faculty (20%), employer reputation (10%), international student ratio (5%) and international staff ratio (5%).
QS is a global specialist providing information on higher education. It is active in more than 50 countries and has partnerships in place with more than 2,000 higher education institutions throughout the world. Its headquarters are in London, but it also has offices in Portland, Paris, Stuttgart, Singapore and Alicante.
Alice Gast, president at Imperial College London, said: “These rankings support what our students, alumni, staff, friends and collaborators know, that Imperial is one of the world’s great universities. Imperial has a rare ability to turn outstanding research into discoveries that have a real impact on the world.”
