Massachusets Institute of Technology has again topped the world’s best universities in a new ranking released by Quacquarelli Symonds, becoming the only university to top the ranking list for eight consecutive years.
Five of the top ten universities are located in the U.S.; four others are British while only one is from Switzerland, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Quacquarelli Symonds employs six simple metrics to rank 1,000 universities worldwide. 40 percent of the weighting is allotted to a university’s academic reputation score. The score is based on their survey of 80,000 individuals in the higher education space, scoring higher education institutions based on their teaching and research quality.
Faculty/student ratio and citations per faculty each hold a 20 percent weight. Employer reputation, international faculty ratio, and international student ratios are other metrics used to evaluate university rankings as well. MIT earned a perfect overall score of 100.
MIT was also ranked the world’s top university in 11 subjects areas including chemistry, computer science and information systems, chemical engineering, civil and structural engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, mechanical, aeronautical and manufacturing engineering, linguistics, materials science, mathematics, physics and astronomy, and statistics and operational research by QS in February.
Stanford University, Harvard University, California Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago were the other American universities that placed in the top ten.
For the first time, two Chinese universities, Tsinghua University and Peking University, made it to the top 25 universities in the world.