China leaps ahead of United Kingdom, Germany in global rankings

In Times Higher Education World University Rankings, released last week, the United States showed “signs of decline”, as did Japan and South Korea.

U.S. News & World Report issued their annual report of the top colleges and universities in the world.

“It’s great that this approach has been recognised in the latest THE world university rankings”.

The schools that top the other 2016 regional rankings are the reigning No. 1s from 2015: Japan’s University of Tokyo in Asia; Australia’s University of Melbourne in Australia/New Zealand; the U.K.’s Oxford in Europe; and Brazil’s Universidade de São Paulo in Latin America.

The Washington Post noticed similar issues with last year’s rankings, and the answer lies in the new way U.S. News & World Report assesses global universities.

Princeton University has maintained its status among the top global universities.

Commencement ceremony at Princeton University, which ranked 13th on a new list of the best global universities. European countries also tended to be well-represented in the top five of each subject area. The University of Pennsylvania moved up from the No. 19 spot to a tie with Yale University in the US for No. 14.

As with all rankings, the list probably should be taken with a grain of salt. A total of 750 universities were ranked.

Ellen Hazelkorn, whose Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education was released this year, sees a different message. The Best Global Universities methodology – which is based on data and metrics provided by Thomson Reuters InCitesTM research analytics solutions – weighs factors that measure a university’s global and regional reputation; academic research performance using bibliometric indicators; and school-level data on faculty and Ph.D. graduates.

UCLA was also named among the very best in several of the survey’s 22 subject rankings: psychiatry/psychology (No. 3), chemistry (No. 6), arts and humanities (No. 7), nanoscience and behavior (No. 7), mathematics (No. 7), biology and biochemistry (No. 10), materials science (No. 10) and clinical medicine (No. 10).