A report by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has showed that 10 universities including Harvard ranked at the top.
A statement from ARWU, which showed a new list on Tuesday by China’s ShanghaiRanking Consultancy, in Shanghai, said all the top 10 universities last year retained their place in the top 10 for 2016.
The first 20 top universities on the ranking lists include Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Cambridge, one of the oldest universities in the world, founded in 1209, Princeton University, University of Oxford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), others include California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, University of Chicago, Yale University and University of California, Los Angeles, Cornell University, University of California, San Diego,
Others are University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, University College London, University of Pennsylvania, ETH Zurich, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and University of Tokyo for the Asia/Pacific region.
The statement said the ranking results confirmed Harvard University as number one in the world for the 14th year running.
ShanghaiRanking Consultancy noted that Harvard, a highly residential university with a strong emphasis on research and had produced 62 living billionaires, 150 Nobel Laureates and eight US presidents.
It stated that Stanford University also retained second place while Berkeley and University of Cambridge both dropped one place.
The report said eight of the top universities are in the US with Oxford and Cambridge completing the list of elite institutions in the top 10.
“One Swiss and one Japanese university make it to the top 20.
ShanghaiRanking Consultancy noted that Asia for the first time broke a new ground in this year’s ranking, with universities in China and Singapore in the top 100 for the first time.
“Tsinghua University in China is the country’s best university in 58th position, and the National University of Singapore is the country’s top entry at position 83.
It said that ETH Zurich was the 19th in overall took first place in continental Europe, while the University of Copenhagen the 31st in Denmark overtook Pierre & Marie Curie (39th) in France, as the second best European university outside the UK.
“The University of Melbourne was in the 40th place and the highest performing country in Oceania.
ShanghaiRanking Consultancy noted that in total, 500 universities are ranked from across the world based on six indicators.
These include the number of award-winning staff and alumni and the number of articles published in prestigious journals of Nature and Science. ShanghaiRanking Consultancy noted that outside the top 100, universities are banded into groups of 50 or 100 to accommodate statistically insignificant variations in scores at this level.
The ARWU has been published annually since 2013 by ShanghaiRanking Consultancy.
It provides a different view of the best universities in the world to the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings 2016 which ranks 800 universities.
