This year for first time since 2004, Harvard University lost the top spot in a global ranking of higher education institutions to California Institute of Technology.
In the annual table compiled by the London-based Times Higher Education, based on data supplied by Thomson Reuters Corporation, Stanford University shared the second place with Harvard. The University of Oxford rose to fourth from sixth in 2010, outnumbering the University of Cambridge at sixth. Princeton University is ranked fifth.
Harvard is the world’s richest university and has topped the rankings since their inception eight years ago. The survey compares universities across five areas: industry income, teaching, citations, research and international outlook. More than 17,500 academics participated and 50 million citations analyzed and compared with the world average for this year’s rankings.
This year, once again the U.S. and U.K. universities dominated the list, with 75 American schools in the top 200. Seven of the top 10 schools were in the U.S., with the rest in Britain. Private universities continue to perform better than public ones. Premier U.S. educational institutions that depend on public funding, had slipped on the list compared with a year ago.
Oxford beat Cambridge, the U.K.’s richest university, after a change in the survey’s methodology put arts, humanities and social sciences on an equal footing with science.
The U.K. had the most number of universities in the top 200 after the U.S., with 32. While the British universities did well, it is expected their performance to deteriorate further in 2012, due to exceptionally high tuition fee, spending cuts and new visa restrictions on international students.
The Netherlands, Germany and Canada followed the U.S. and U.K. as the countries with most universities on the list. ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, was the highest ranked outside of the U.S. and U.K. at 15th position.
The University of Tokyo, in 30th place, was the top-ranked Asian school. Japan has five schools in the top 200, the most of any Asian nation, while Hong Kong has four and China three.
Universities based in the Middle East did not make it to the list yet.
