There is a considerable shake-up among the top dogs in this year’s league table of the world’s best universities, published by the Times Higher Education magazine today.
Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the only university in the top ten that managed to maintain its position from last year, again ranking number one in the world.
Among the other top ten this year, four universities, including Cambridge in the UK and Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, slipped down the rankings, with the former moving four places to sixth and the latter slipping 7 places to tenth.
Two universities are this year relegated from the top ten. University College London, UK, now ranks 22 compared to fourth last year, and the University of Chicago, US, slipped 5 places to come twelfth this year.
The biggest gains were won by the University of California, Berkeley which jumped 31 places to eighth in the world, and Stanford University in Palo Alto, California which is this year ranked fourth, up 12 places from 2009.
In addition, technology-focused universities placed highly this year. The California Institute of Technology, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came second and third respectively, both gaining ground from 2009.
The only university outside of North America and the UK in the top 20 is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, which ranked fifteenth.
This year’s league table is compiled differently from previous years, placing greater importance on performance indicators such as research volume and income, and citation impact, rather than focusing on the reputation and size of universities (see Nature’s news story on this).
Phil Baty, editor of Times Higher Education World University Rankings, said, “Some institutions, and even whole countries, have not come out well under the new system. Others look much better.”
He adds, “Because of the change to the methodology, any movement up or down since 2009 cannot be seen as a change in performance by an individual country or institution.”
But he says the rankings are “realistic” and “may deliver an unpleasant wake-up call that the days of trading on reputation alone are coming to an end.”
Responding to the rankings, Paul Wellings, chairman of the 1994 Group of research-intensive universities in the UK, urged the UK government to re-think its plans for slashing university budgets.
He said in a statement that the success of a wide range of UK research-intensive universities in the rankings “demonstrates that it would be wrong to consider artificially concentrating funding further into a very small number of institutions.”