Best Universities, Colleges In US: World University Rankings 2019 Released

The Times Higher Education (THE) has released the World University Rankings for the year 2019, and seven educational institutions from the United States are featured in the top 10.

The universities from the U.S. that have made the cut are Stanford University (Ranked 3rd), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (4th), California Institute of Technology (5th), Harvard University (6th), Princeton University (7th), Yale University (8th) and the University of Chicago (10th).

THE ranking boasts of being the “biggest international league table to date” as the list included over 1,250 universities.

“It is the only global university performance table to judge research-intensive universities across all of their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. We use 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons, trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments,” THE website read.

It further added: “The calculation of the rankings for 2019 has been audited by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), making these the only global university rankings to be subjected to full, independent scrutiny of this nature.”

The first and second positions on the list were occupied by University of Oxford (1st) and University of Cambridge (2nd) — two institutions in the United Kingdom that have maintained their elite rankings for the second year in a row.

The only newcomer to appear in the top 10 of the extensive list this year was Yale University, up from its last year's 12th spot. At the same time, Switzerland’s ETH Zurich lost its spot in the top 10, slipping from its 10th raking to 11th this year.

Meanwhile, China’s Tsinghua University was hailed as the best university in Asia, as it rose eight spots from last year and secured the 22nd rank this year. The status of being Asia’s number one university was previously held by the National University of Singapore, but it dropped from 22nd to 23rd position this year.

According to THE, Tsinghua’s rise to fame was largely attributed to the institution’s “improvements to its teaching environment,” “increases in institutional income” and “the share of PhD degrees awarded.”

Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the University of Oxford, explained why he thought Tsinghua's status was boosted this year.

"It's easily the number one university in the world for high citation research in mathematics and computing -- a combined field in which China has now moved well ahead of the U.S. and, further back, Europe. It is near the top of the world, and rising fast, in physical sciences and engineering," he said, according to THE.

While last year’s list only featured 63 universities from China, this year’s ranking has 72 Chinese institutions. On the other hand, in Europe, Germany received a major boost for the 2019 ranking, with eight of the country’s institutions in the top 100.

Countries like India and Australia failed to leave a mark as only six Australian institutions featured in the top 100 and none from the former even made it to the top 200.