Yale University

Summary

Yale University is a private institution that was founded in 1701. It has a total undergraduate enrollment of 5,477, its setting is urban, and the campus size is 343 acres. It utilizes a semester-based academic calendar. Yale University's ranking in the 2016 edition of Best Colleges is National Universities, 3. Its tuition and fees are $47,600 (2015-16).

Yale University, located in New Haven, Connecticut, is known for its excellent drama and music programs, which reach outside the classroom with student organizations such as the Yale Whiffenpoofs, a famous a cappella group, and the Yale Dramatic Association. The Yale Bulldogs compete in the Ivy League and are well known for their rivalry with Harvard. Students are assigned to live in one of 12 residential colleges during their time at Yale. Each college has a master and dean who live in the college and eat with students in the dining halls. Cultural houses provide a space for students to build a sense of cultural identity on campus.

Yale is made up of the College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and 13 professional schools. Included in the professional schools are the top ranked Law School and highly ranked School of Management, School of Medicine , School of Art and School of Nursing. The School of Drama, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Divinity School are also well-regarded graduate programs. The Yale Record is the oldest college humor magazine in the nation. Dwight Hall is an independent umbrella organization that fosters student service and activism in the local New Haven community. Yale is well known for its secret societies, the most famous of which are the Skull and Bone Society, which boasts members such as George W. Bush and John Kerry, and the Scroll and Key Society. Distinguished Yale alumni include actress Meryl Streep, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and actor Edward Norton.

School mission and unique qualities (as provided by the school):

Yale is both a small college and a large research university. The College is surrounded by thirteen distinguished graduate and professional schools, and...

General Information

School type	private, coed college
Year founded	1701
Religious affiliation	N/A
Academic calendar	semester
Setting	city
2014 Endowment	$23,858,561,000

Applying

When applying to Yale University, it's important to note the application deadline is January 1, and the early action deadline is November 1. Scores for either the ACT or SAT test are due March 1. The application fee at Yale University is $80. It is most selective, with an acceptance rate of 6.3 percent and an early acceptance rate of 15.5 percent.

For more information about the tests, essays, interviews and admissions process, visit the Applying to College knowledge center.

Selectivity	most selective
Fall 2014 acceptance rate	6.3%
Application deadline	January 1
SAT/ACT scores must be received by	March 1

Academic Life

The student-faculty ratio at Yale University is 6:1, and the school has 74.6 percent of its classes with fewer than 20 students. The most popular majors at Yale University include: Economics, General; Political Science and Government, General; Biology/Biological Sciences, General; History, General; and Psychology, General. The average freshman retention rate, an indicator of student satisfaction, is 98.8 percent.

Harvard University

Summary

Harvard University is a private institution that was founded in 1636. It has a total undergraduate enrollment of 6,694, its setting is urban, and the campus size is 5,076 acres. It utilizes a semester-based academic calendar. Harvard University's ranking in the 2016 edition of Best Colleges is National Universities, 2. Its tuition and fees are $45,278 (2015-16).

Harvard is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. Harvard's extensive library system houses the oldest collection in the United States and the largest private collection in the world. There is more to the school than endless stacks, though: Harvard's athletic teams compete in the Ivy League, and every football season ends with "The Game," an annual matchup between storied rivals Harvard and Yale. At Harvard, on-campus residential housing is an integral part of student life. Freshmen live around the Harvard Yard at the center of campus, after which they are placed in one of 12 undergraduate houses for their remaining three years. Although they are no longer recognized by the university as official student groups, the eight all-male "final clubs" serve as social organizations for some undergraduate students; Harvard also has five female clubs.

In addition to the College, Harvard is made up of 13 other schools and institutes, including the top-ranked Business School and Medical School and the highly ranked Graduate Education School, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Law School and John F. Kennedy School of Government. Eight U.S. presidents graduated from Harvard College, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Other notable alumni include Henry David Thoreau, Helen Keller, Yo-Yo Ma and Tommy Lee Jones. In 1977, Harvard signed an agreement with sister institute Radcliffe College, uniting them in an educational partnership serving male and female students, although they did not officially merge until 1999. Harvard also has the largest endowment of any school in the world.

School mission and unique qualities (as provided by the school):

N/A

General Information

School type	private, coed college
Year founded	1636
Religious affiliation	N/A
Academic calendar	semester
Setting	urban
2014 Endowment	$36,429,256,000

Applying

When applying to Harvard University, it's important to note the application deadline is January 1, and the early action deadline is November 1. Scores for either the ACT or SAT test are due March 6. The application fee at Harvard University is $75. It is most selective, with an acceptance rate of 6 percent.

For more information about the tests, essays, interviews and admissions process, visit the Applying to College knowledge center.

Selectivity	most selective
Fall 2014 acceptance rate	6%
Application deadline	January 1
SAT/ACT scores must be received by	March 6

Academic Life

The student-faculty ratio at Harvard University is 7:1, and the school has 74 percent of its classes with fewer than 20 students. The most popular majors at Harvard University include: Social Sciences, General; Biology/Biological Sciences, General; History, General; Mathematics, General; and Physical Sciences. The average freshman retention rate, an indicator of student satisfaction, is 97 percent.

Princeton University

Summary

Princeton University is a private institution that was founded in 1746. It has a total undergraduate enrollment of 5,391, its setting is suburban, and the campus size is 600 acres. It utilizes a semester-based academic calendar. Princeton University's ranking in the 2016 edition of Best Colleges is National Universities, 1. Its tuition and fees are $43,450 (2015-16).

Princeton, the fourth-oldest college in the United States, is located in the quiet town of Princeton, New Jersey. Within the walls of its historic ivy-covered campus, Princeton offers a number of events, activities and organizations. The Princeton Tigers, members of the Ivy League, are well known for their consistently strong men's and women's lacrosse teams. Students live in one of six residential colleges that provide a residential community as well as dining services but have the option to join one of more than 10 eating clubs for their junior and senior years. The eating clubs serve as social and dining organizations for the students who join them. Princeton's unofficial motto, "In the Nation's Service and in the Service of All Nations," speaks to the university's commitment to community service.

Princeton includes highly ranked graduate programs through the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. One unique aspect of Princeton's academic program is that all undergraduate students are required to write a senior thesis. Notable alumni include U.S. President Woodrow Wilson; John Forbes Nash, subject of the 2001 film "A Beautiful Mind"; model/actress Brooke Shields; and first lady Michelle Obama. According to Princeton legend, if a student exits campus through FitzRandolph Gate prior to graduation, he or she may be cursed never to graduate.

School mission and unique qualities (as provided by the school):

Princeton University is unique in combining the strengths of a major research university with the qualities of an outstanding liberal arts college. Whether...

General Information

School type	private, coed college
Year founded	1746
Religious affiliation	N/A
Academic calendar	semester
Setting	suburban
2014 Endowment	$20,576,361,000

About The World's Top Universities 2015

The California Institute of Technology, a private school with just 2,200 students in Pasadena, CA, takes the number one slot again this year in the 12^th annual World University Rankings, put out by Times Higher Education (THE), a London magazine that tracks the higher ed market. Four years ago Caltech bumped Harvard out of first place. This year Harvard has slipped to 6^th place, down from 2^nd in 2014. Second place this year goes to the oldest university in the English-speaking world, University of Oxford in the U.K., which dates its origins to 1069. Stanford, America’s great incubator of tech talent (Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are alumni), has moved up to third from fourth place, followed by another British institution, University of Cambridge, and STEM-focused Massachusetts Institute of Technology. See our slideshow above for the top 10 schools and click here for THE’s ranking of 800 universities.

Unlike Forbes’ own ranking, which only measures U.S. schools, THE casts its net around the world. The list emphasizes global scholarship and reputation and does not consider things like entry requirements, graduation rates, professor ratings by students or alumni salaries. “We put the heaviest weight on research and innovation, research productivity and research excellence,” says THE rankings editor Phil Baty. “Our list is really about producing new ideas, about innovating, about attracting skills and talented people into a country,” he adds. “It’s also about bringing business money into the higher education center.” THE gives a lot of weight to universities’ efficacy as graduate institutions, weighing things like the number of doctorates an institution awards and the extent to which top scholars teach and mentor undergraduates. THE considers only universities, not colleges.

We think THE’s rankings are worth a story in part because both universities and governments around the world are taking them seriously. Baty says Japan, with only two schools in the top 200 this year, down from five last year, is planning an educational growth strategy to boost its stature. (University of Tokyo and Kyoto University made the cut this year.) Government funding of universities has foundered as the economy has struggled, says Baty. Indian president Pranab Mukherjee has invited Baty on a visit to discuss the rankings. Baty says that Russian officials have met with him, in hopes of increasing their schools’ presence in the top 200 and THE held a conference in Moscow in December 2014. Still, only one Russian school is in the top 200, Lomonosov Moscow State University, in 161^st place, though it’s climbed from last year’s ranking of 196. “These countries want to know how they compare to the world’s best universities, says Baty.

To compile its ranking, THE looked at 13 different metrics to evaluate whether schools are achieving what it deems their core mission: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and what it calls “international outlook.”

Thirty percent of the ranking score comes from citations of a university’s scholarship. Thomson Reuters, which does the data crunching for THE, combed through more than 50 million journal articles in 11 million research papers published over a five-year period through 2014, and then calculated how many times those articles were cited by other scholars. Another 30% of the score comes from the volume of institutions’ research, and the reputation and income it generates. While THE also looks at teaching to derive 30% of a school’s score, it does not query students. Instead it examines four things: 1) staff-to-student ratios, 2) the percent of the faculty who have PhDs, 3) survey results from 10,500 academics around the world who answered questions about the best departments in their disciplines, specialists in their field, and where they would recommend their graduates go for further study, 4) total income of the university per faculty member. To measure international outlook, which counts for 7.5% of the score,THE looks at diversity on campus and to what degree academics collaborate with international colleague on research. The last 2.5% of the score comes from what THEcalls “industry income,” which means the level of research funding the school gets from corporations. For THE’s complete methodology.

World University Rankings 2015-2016: top 10

Simon Marginson, professor of international higher education at the UCL Institute of Education, said that US research is “not declining in the absolute sense”, but rather “other countries are improving and crowding into the top 200 space”.

One of these competitor nations is the UK, which has improved its standing this year. A total of 78 UK institutions feature in the top 800, with 34 of these sitting in the first quarter, up from 29 last year.

Other countries in Europe have also performed well. Germany has 20 universities in the top 200, a rise of eight since last year, while the Netherlands has 12 in the first quarter, up from 11. Meanwhile, Switzerland’s ETH Zurich is the first non-Anglo-American institution to make the top 10 for a decade.

Overall, Europe has 345 universities in the world top 800, meaning its institutions comprise more than two-fifths of the table.

Professor Marginson said that the results reveal that “15 years of consolidation of higher education, in the Nordic countries, the Low Countries and German-speaking world, is now bearing fruit”.

In particular, he cited national programmes to foster research concentrations, the European Research Area grant programmes, the Bologna-instigated reforms, and “carefully managed immigration policies that decouple high-talent recruitment from other forms of migration” as strategies that have improved their university systems.

Yangcheng Coal-Fired Power Plant, Shanxi Province, China

Yangcheng International Power Company is now operating its 2,100MW (six x 350MW) number one coal-fired plant in Shanxi Province, about 800km south-west of Beijing. The steam generators fire low-volatile anthracite coals from a nearby mine, representing a new power supply strategy for China.

Yangcheng International Power Company is a joint venture between AES Corp, the leading US Independent Power Producer (IPP), and four Chinese groups.

Yangcheng supplies power to the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu as part of China's effort to substitute the transmission of electricity for the transportation of coal (the coal-by-wire strategy).

Previously, power stations were built close to markets and coal was transported to them. As well as being expensive, this created transport congestion and other environmental problems.

The new power plant was built on the site of the coal mine, in Shanxi Province, and the electricity generated is transmitted through a 740km, high-voltage transmission line to Jiangsu.

Orders for the plant were placed in 1996 and the first turbine was started before the end of 1999. Other turbines started up at five-month intervals until 2002.

Electricity supplied from Shanxi, China's major coal producer

For AES, Yangcheng marked a significant advance in the Chinese IPP market. Its earlier Chinese projects were on the small to medium scale. This project was one of China's largest, taking AES into the top ranks in the country.Shanxi Province, China's major coal producer, is working on becoming the country's largest electricity provider. According to a three-year plan, the provincial government set aside RMB¥70bn for improving ten large power plants. After completion of Yangcheng, Shanxi had an installed capacity of 6,500MW, and produces 30 billion kWh of electricity for other Chinese provinces annually.

AES invested $98m in the joint venture, with the Chinese subsidiary of US company AES holding a 25% stake in the project. Chinese sponsors include North China Electric Power, local utilities in Shanxi and Jiangsu and provincial investment arms. The partners' agreement was expected to run for 20 years from the venture formation in October 1996.

In May 2012, AES sold 25% of its equity interest in the plant to Sembcorp Utilities for $85.5m. The move was part of AES' decision to exit markets which do not provide a competitive advantage. AES is planning to sell most of its businesses in China for $134m by the second half of 2012.

With this move, AES' involvement in China's National Grid will comprise of only one hydro and one gas-fired plant, amounting to a total gross capacity of 75MW or 31MW on an owner-adjusted basis.

Investment of around $1.9bn was mostly covered by debt, although project shareholders supplied $393m in equity. Initial equity investments were made in June 1997. International sources provided around 55% of the finance.

Finances backing Yangcheng's coal-fired plant

The US Export-Import Bank initially provided $400m, and Germany's official development finance group Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) provided a similar sum, at an annual interest rate of about 6.6%. China's Construction Bank and the China State Development Bank provided the main Chinese project funding.

Contracts awarded and companies involved with Yangcheng power station

Yangcheng awarded contracts worth about $400m to Siemens, and $350m to Foster Wheeler Energy Group, to design and equip the Yangcheng power station. Yangcheng itself handled civil works, commissioning and erection of the plant, although both Siemens and Foster acted as consultants.

Foster Wheeler provided engineering, procurement and delivery of six 350MW steam generators, coal-handling equipment and ash removal systems. The steam generators use FW's double-arch fired technology. The group claimed it to be the largest single-steam generator order ever placed in China.Siemens provided plant design and the six 350MW steam turbine units, generators, instrumentation and control equipment. The contract is Siemens biggest to date in China. The company has been involved in five coal projects in the country, with a combined capacity of 5,100MW. Tianjin UBS Park Industrial supplied the steel structure, roofing, siding, decking panels, windows and doors for UBA and UMA Building.

Shanxi Provincial Coal Transportation and Sales Company supplies low sulphur coal to power the station.

Zaporizhye Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine

The 6,000MW Zaporizhye Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), located in Energodar in the south-eastern part of Ukraine, is the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe and the fifth biggest in the world.

It is owned and operated by Ukraine's national nuclear energy generating company Energoatom and is one of the four operational NPPs in the country. It produces around half of the country's nuclear power, which accounts for more than 22% of the total electricity produced in the country.

The plant consists of six pressurised water reactor (PWR) units, each with a gross electrical capacity of 1,000MW, which were commissioned between 1984 and 1995. Unit 3 was shut down on 28 November 2014 and put under repair until 5 December 2014 following a short circuit in the plant's transformer yard.

On 3 December 2014, Energoatom confirmed that it was an electrical fault confined only to the power output section, without affecting the reactor, and that the radiation levels around the plant had remained unchanged.

Zaporizhye NPP details and reactors

Each generating block of the plant consists of a VVER-1000/V-320 reactor, K-1000-60/1500-2 steam turbine and a TWW-1000-4 generator. The Soviet-designed VVER-1000s are pressurised water reactors designed to operate for 30 years.The Zaporizhye nuclear power facility is situated on a 104.7ha site on the banks of the Kakhovka reservoir. The Steppe zone of Ukraine was selected because of available infrastructure at the nearby Zaporozhe Thermal Power Plant, with land unsuitable for agriculture and its distance from foreign territories.

Units 1 and 2 are undergoing a lifetime extension, involving the modernisation of equipment and installation of tension sensors and other advanced safety systems, following the March 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Zaporizhye spent-fuel dry storage facility

Following the breakup of the USSR, spent-fuel could no longer be transported to Russia and the shortage of free space in the cooling pools demanded a spent-fuel dry storage facility (SFDSF) at the site. Zaporizhye is the first Ukrainian nuclear power plant with VVER type reactors to include a SFDSF.

The spent nuclear fuel from the reactors is stored in cooling pools for four to five years until their residual energy and radioactivity decrease. It is then transferred to the SFDSF.

The storage system can accommodate more than 9,000 spent-fuel assemblies in 380 ventilated storage casks. The facility began operations in August 2004 and 80 casks have already been installed on the site.

Zaporizhye NPP history and technical design

The Council of Ministers of the USSR decided to build a series of nuclear power plants, including the Zaporizhye NPP, in 1978 after the first unit of the Chernobyl NPP began operations.

Zaporizhye NPP's technical design of the first stage, consisting of four units with a combined capacity of 4,000MW, was approved in 1980, and the first unit was commissioned in 1984. The second, third and fourth units were commissioned in 1985, 1986 and 1987 respectively. Meanwhile, the second stage, involving two additional power units with similar reactors, was proposed in 1988 and the fifth unit was commissioned in 1989.

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster prompted the Supreme Council of Ukraine to order a moratorium in 1990 on the construction of new nuclear power units in Ukraine, which led to the suspension of construction work on Unit 6. Severe winters and increasing electricity demand resulted in the lifting of the moratorium, clearing the way for the construction of the Unit 6. The unit was finally grid-connected in 1995, becoming the first nuclear reactor unit in an independent Ukraine.

Contractors involved with the Ukrainian nuclear power plant

Kharkov Scientific Research & Design Institute 'Energoprojekt' (HIEP), Duke Engineering & Services (DE&S) and Sierra Nuclear Corporation (SNC) were involved in the design, construction, testing and operation of the spent-fuel dry storage facility.The VVER-1000 reactors were manufactured by Russian heavy engineering firm Izhorskiye Zavody. Kharkiv turbine plant, now called Turboatom, supplied the 1,000MW steam turbines. Russian engineering company AtomEnergoproekt designed the Zaporizhye nuclear power plant.

HIEP was the general consultant for the design and construction of the facility, while DE&S was responsible for the project development, logistics, construction supervision, licensing, quality assurance, commissioning and maintenance of the systems and equipment. SNC supplied the dry cask storage system for the spent-fuel.

Westinghouse Electric Company was awarded a contract by Energoatom to provide a passive hydrogen control system for Units 1 and 2 to enhance the plant's safety. A contract extension agreement was also signed between the two companies in April 2014 for fuel deliveries to the Ukrainian nuclear power plants through to 2020.

Before the annexation of Crimea, Ukraine depended on Russian nuclear fuel company TVEL for the supply of enriched fuel.