UNIVERSITY UPDATES

The World’s Top 25 Universities
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is in first place in the latest league table of the world’s best universities.  It’s the third year in a row that the US university, famous for its science and technology research, has been top of the QS World University Rankings. Behind MIT in third place is Harvard University, the world’s wealthiest university. And two UK universities take fifth and sixth place, Cambridge and Oxford. But US universities are still in the majority, taking 12 of the places in the top 20.

But how does a university get to the top of the rankings? And why does such a small group of institutions seem to have an iron grip on the top places? The biggest single factor in the rankings is academic reputation. This is calculated by surveying more than 60,000 academics around the world about their opinion on the merits of institutions other than their own. The next biggest factor – “citations per faculty” – looks at the strength of research in universities, calculated in terms of the number of times research work is cited by other researchers. The ratio of academic staff to students represents another big chunk of how the rankings are decided.