Oxford and Cambridge overtake US universities to rank among top three Nkola Woolcock Education Editor Oxford and Cambridge have secured the second and third spots in a global ranking table for the fir[.]
Oxford and Cambridge overtake US universities to rank among top three Nkola Woolcock Education Editor Oxford and Cambridge have secured the second and third spots in a global ranking table for the first time in a decade, after years of domination by American universities Massachusetts Institute of Techno logy remained in first place in the annual QS World University Rankings for the tenth year, but Harvard fell from third to fifth, Stanford from second to joint third and California Institute of Technology from fourth to sixth There are two Chinese institutions in the top 20 for the first time They sit alongside Edinburgh, up from 20th to 16th UCL, up from tenth to eighth, and Imperial, up from eighth to seventh Oxford climbed the table from fifth due to the quality of its research, and this was before developing a corona virus vaccine with AstraZeneca Both it and Cambridge, which was seventh last time, were praised for research, global Degrees ahead Latest ranking (position last year) Massachusetts Institute of 1(1) Technology (MIT) US (5) University of Oxford, UK 3^(g Stanford Unjvereitv/us t?) uhiveraty of Cambridge UK ’'g Harvard University US 5(3) 6(4) California Institute of •? Technology (Caltech), US (8) imperial College London, UK I 8= (6) ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Switzerland 8= (10) University College London (UCL) I _ ị I collaboration and **near*unparalleled levels of teaching capacity" Oxford has never come higher than second and was last placed there in 2006 Cambridge, which came first in 2010 and 2011, was joint third alongside Stanford, its best result since 2016 To determine the world's best univer sities, QS uses measures including the impact of their research, the esteem in which they are held by academics around the world, the quality of their graduates judged by their reputation among employers and the ratio of stu dents to academic faculty Both Oxford and Cambridge had perfect scores for the esteem in which they are held, their graduate quality and dieir institutional teaching capa city Their gains were due to improved research impact scores: Oxford scored 96 out of 100 and Cambridge 92.1 The report’s authors praised UK uni versities'high levels of global collabora tion which were reflected in high publi cation rates in thejournals with the big gest impact around the world They said that about 20 per cent of the world’s research was done as a result of global collaboration For the UK, this figure was 53 per cent Forty per cent of the UK’s research papers were published in the top 10 per cent of academic journals by impact, four times the global average Within the top 100, Warwick Uni versity rose to 61st, Glasgow was up to 73rd Southampton increased to 77th, Durham was up to 86th and St Andrews rose to 91sL However, King’s College London fell from 31st to 35th, Bristol from 58th to 62nd, Birmingham from 87th to 90th, Leeds from 91st to 92nd and Sheffield from 93rd to 95th In total across the full rankings of 1,300 institutions, there were90 British universities, of which 22 were stable 28 improved and 36 fell American higher education showed signs of decline: 91 of its 177 ranked uni versities moved down the table, vrith only 29 improving their position Tsinghua University, (China’s leading university, placed 17th followed by Pe king University in 18th Asia’s top two universities are in Singapore: the Nat ional University in 11th and Nan>'ang Technological University in 12th from The Times, June 9,2021