Best Universities In The World : UK Tops League Table.

Best universities in the world: UK tops league table

Sep 22, 2016

Oxford snatches top spot in the global rankings – a first for a UK university – but Asia is on the rise

Best universities in the world: UK tops league table

The University of Oxford has become the first UK institution to lead the annual Times Higher Educationrankings, knocking the five-times champion, the California Institute of Technology, into second place.

Oxford topped the list because it has improved across the four main indicators that influence the rankings – teaching, research, citations and international outlook, Times Higher Education said.

Rankings editor Phil Baty welcomed the news but voiced his concern at the consequences of the UK's vote to leave the EU.

"As well as some top academics reporting they have been frozen out of collaborative research projects with EU colleagues, many are admitting that they might look to relocate to a university outside the country," Baty told the BBC.

"The UK must ensure that it limits the damage to academics, students, universities and science during its Brexit negotiations, to ensure that the UK remains one of the world leaders in higher education."

The University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, also feature in the top ten, while University College London (UCL) slipped from 14th place last year to 15th.

Overall, the UK takes 91 of the top 980 places in the 13th annual Times HigherEducation rankings; 88 of these make the top 800 compared with 78 last year.

The list is dominated by US universities. Stanford University is ranked third, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology fifth, Harvard sixth and Princeton seventh. The University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago are joint tenth.

More broadly, the rankings show that institutions in Asia have made progress - two new names are now in the top 100 and another four join the top 200.

"The UK will have to watch out for Asia's continuing ascent. Although the notion of Asia as the 'next higher education superpower' has become something of a cliche in recent years, the continent's rise in the rankings is real and growing," says Baty.

The world's top 20 institutions:

University of Oxford, UK

California Institute of Technology,US

Stanford University, US

University of Cambridge, UK

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US

Harvard University, US

Princeton University, US

Imperial College London, UK

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland

=10. University of Chicago, US

=10. University of California, Berkeley, US

Yale University, US

University of Pennsylvania, US

University of California, Los Angeles, US

University College London, UK

Columbia University, US

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, US

Duke University, Durham, US

Cornell University, US

Northwestern University, US

.. Francis Iyamba.