World’s Top Universities: Private Universities in the US Dominate World’s Top-10 Universities
An assessment carried out by AllAboutUni.com reveals that private universities in the US dominate the world’s top universities. AllAboutUni.com is an independent, global and inter-active website where users can obtain information about universities (global rankings, student reviews, university news and campus pictures).
The assessment of the World’s Top Universities has been produced on a yearly basis since 2003 by the Institute of Higher Education at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The Institute ranks the World’s Top 500 Universities based on several indicators of academic or research performance, these include staff winning Nobel Prizes, highly cited researchers and articles indexed in major citation indices.
The top 10 Universities in 2008 were (listed in descending order): Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Chicago and University of Oxford. With the exception of 2003, when the University of Yale was ranked 8th, the rankings have remained relatively stable over the past six years.
A closer look at the rankings reveals that in each year since 2003, 8 out of the top-10 universities were located in the United States and 7 were private institutions. The exceptions were the University of California at Berkeley, which is a public institution in the United States, and the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, which are public institutions in the United Kingdom.
The dominant position of private universities is striking and would suggest that these institutions, some of which were established relatively recently (e.g. Stanford University which was established in 1891), are better equipped to provide a world-class academic environment. This may be related to better management practices, a more global outlook (compared to public universities which often operate on a regional basis), access to greater resources (e.g. the endowment of Harvard University is currently 34.9 billion US dollars) and possibly also greater academic freedom (e.g. freedom to concentrate solely on academic research).
The AllAboutUni.com website provides a portal where students can find independent information about universities from around the world. ‘The website allows students to compare colleges and universities online based on independent information: the Shanghai rankings, student reviews and campus pictures. Combining this with the information provided by university websites, we hope students will be able to find the college or university of their dreams’, says John Paget, Founder of the AllAboutUni.com website. John studied Economics at the London School of Economic and then completed graduate studies in the United Kingdom and Switzerland. The AllAboutUni.com website was launched in November 2007.
