Harvard has been ranked as the top university in the world for the sixth consecutive year, while none of the Indian institutes of higher education figure in the latest edition of The Times Higher Education , world reputation ranking report. The United States dominates the rankings of 200 world class universities.
China has performed exceedingly well with six of its universities figuring in the list of 200, two in the first 50s as per the World University Rankings 2010-2011 based on the largest global survey of academic opinion where more than 13,000 experienced academics from 131 countries give their expert insight.
Between 2004 and 2009, the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management and the Jawaharlal Nehru University figured in the global list of 200 institutes but have slipped out in the new scoring system.
However, the Indian Institutes of Technology Roorkee, Kharagpur, Delhi, Kanpur and Bombay; Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Indian Institute of Science, University of Delhi and Anna University do figure in the top 100 Asian Universities.
Cambridge has been named as the most highly regarded universities in the world, while Oxford among the United Kingdom's came third in a table that ranked universities exclusively on the basis of “academics” worldwide.
Seven of the United States universities figured in the top 10, followed by the United Kingdom making Japan the only country whose university found a place in the rankings as Tokyo University was placed eighth.
U.S., U.K. at the top
Overall, the U.S. had 45 universities in the top 100, while the U.K. had 12 and Japan had five. These three nations were the best represented in the rankings. Canada, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands had four universities each in the top 100.
According to Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2010-2011 , Harvard University ranking at the top had an overall score of 96.1, California Institute of Technology that occupied the second slot had 96 points followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Stanford University was adjudged the fourth best institution and Princeton University, the fifth.
The Chinese institutes of higher educations that figured in the list are Beijing University (37th rank), University of Science and Technology of China (49), Tsinghua University (58), Nanjing University (120), Sun Yat-sen University (172) and Zhejiang University (197).
Although this is the seventh year that the global rankings have been announced, but the exercise undertaken for 2010-2011 adopted a methodology which included 13 criteria for judging. This was done to avoid the criticism that the ranking was primarily based on perception.
The ranking was done based on the points scored for teaching, research, citation, innovation and international mix of students and teachers.
