2010 Ranking: World's BEST Universities

QS World University Rankings

A product of QS group, a leading education and career network, this is the biggest survey-based ranking of top universities. It surveys 15,050 academics, 5007 employers whose perceptions together are given 50% weightage. 20% is given to journal citations, another 20% to student faculty ratio, and the last 10% is divided between international faculty and international students. It is in its seventh edition and until last year was working with Times Higher Education magazine. The research citations were sourced from Scopus.
Times Higher Education Rankings
A first edition, as an independent player this is one of the most comprehensive ranking systems with respect to universities. It is quite similar in structure to QS, though each broad category has much more details and data. One advantage of the THE ranking is that the institutes/ universities do participate and sign in their data. So it is richer and presents a comprehensive picture. IT also a robust survey component.
The ranking parameters are as follows:

• Teaching — learning environment, reputation (30%)
• Research — volume, income and reputation ( 30%)
• Citations — research influence(32.5  %)
• Industry income — innovation earnings ( 2.5%)
• International mix — (5%)( both faculty and students)

Academic Ranking of World Universities
As the name suggests, this is purely an academic ranking, with weights according to alumni winning Nobel prizes and Fields Medal (10%), faculty winning the same (20%), highly cited researchers (20%), publications (40%) and per capita academic performance (10%).  It is published by the Shanghai Jia Tong University, China and is now into its third edition.

The nature of the ranking schemes is such that the outcome also varies quite a bit. Take for example Imperial College. It has been ranked 26th in ARWU but a prestigious 9th and 7th in the other two rankings. In other words, Imperial College probably lost out because of its lack of laureates.

Interestingly, ARWU also throws up universities like University of California, San Diego, University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois, which are not in the popular imagination and hence not rated in the top 30 in both QS and THE.

So the prospective student must look at the parameters before he or she decides which university to pick up.

Table of World University Ranking 2010
S.No.	Institution	Country	THE	ARWU	QS	Avg. Rank
1	Harvard University	USA	1	1	2	1.33
2	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	USA	3	4	5	4.00
3	University of Cambridge	UK	6	5	1	4.00
4	California Institute of Technology	USA	2	6	9	5.67
5	Stanford University	USA	4	3	13	6.67
6	Princeton University	USA	5	7	10	7.33
7	University of Oxford	UK	6	10	6	7.33
8	Yale University	USA	10	11	3	8.00
9	University of Chicago	USA	12	9	8	9.67
10	University of California, Los Angeles	USA	11	13		12.00
11	Columbia University	USA	18	8	11	12.33
12	University of California, Berkeley	USA	8	2	28	12.67
13	Imperial College London	UK	9	26	7	14.00
14	Cornell University	USA	14	12	16	14.00
15	University of California, San Diego	USA		14		14.00
16	University of Pennsylvania	USA	19	15	12	15.33
17	University College London	UK	22	21	4	15.67
18	Johns Hopkins University	USA	13	18	17	16.00
19	University of Wisconsin - Madison	USA		17		17.00
20	University of Michigan	USA	15	22	15	17.33
21	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich	Switzerland	15	23	18	18.67
22	Duke University	USA	24		14	19.00
23	McGill University	Canada			19	19.00
24	University of California, San Francisco	USA		19		19.00
25	University of Washington	USA	23	16		19.50
26	Carnegie Mellon University	USA	20			20.00
27	Australian National University	Australia			20	20.00
28	King’s College London	UK			21	21.00
29	University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong	21		23	22.00
30	University of Edinburgh	UK			22	22.00
31	University of Tokyo	Japan	26	20	24	23.33
32	University of Toronto	Canada	17	27	29	24.33
33	Kyoto University	Japan		24	25	24.50
34	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	USA		25		25.00
35	Northwestern University	USA	25	29	26	26.67
36	Georgia Institute of Technology	USA	27			27.00
37	University of Bristol	UK			27	27.00
38	Pohang University of Science and Technology	Republic of Korea	28			28.00
39	University of Minnesota, Twin Cities	USA		28		28.00
40	University of California, Santa Barbara	USA	29			29.00
41	University of British Columbia	Canada	30			30.00
42	University of Manchester	UK			30	30.00
43	Washington University in St. Louis	USA		30		30.00