A survey of the world’s universities ranks the University of Cambridge as the second best university in the world, after Harvard. Only three universities outside the USA were in the top twenty (the others were the University of Oxford and Tokyo University). The top-ranked university in continental Europe was ETH Zürich, which placed 27th.
Of course, there is considerable arbitrariness in ranking universities, and by choosing slightly different criteria, or weighting the chosen criteria differently, one could arrive at a different ranking order. The criteria used in this survey favour universities which are strong in research in the sciences and mathematics. More balanced criteria might well result, for example, in a higher ranking of the University of Oxford, and a lower ranking of MIT and the California Intitute of Technology.
However, this particular survey is interesting because of its impartiality and academic respectability (it was done by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where evaluation of universities is a research focus). An index of its objectivity is that Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranks itself in equal 301st place.
The list of the top 100 universities in the ranking is here.
The result may seem good to recent graduates, but similar surveys done in the 1970s always put Cambridge at the top. Our University is going through difficult times.
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