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.