Cambridge University Harvard today forfeits first place to the University of Cambridge in a league table of the world's top institutions, the first time in the list's seven

year history that the Ivy League university has been knocked off the number one spot. The QS table is based on measures of research quality, graduate employability, teaching and how international the faculties and student bodies are. Harvard was still most popular among the 5,000 employers polled worldwide, but Cambridge was voted best for research quality in a survey of 15,000 academics and took overall first place. The rankings also use citation counts from a database of academic publishing.
The Times Higher Education magazine, which is publishing its own global university rankings next week, is no longer collaborating with QS. The magazine is concerned that these rankings rely too heavily on subjective surveys of scholars and employers and not enough on hard indicators of excellence. The THE's new rankings are expected to contain disappointing news for some prestigious British institutions.
Some of the key UK losers this year are:
    • University of Oxford down to 6 from 5 last year
    • University of Edinburgh, down two places to 22
    • University of Lancaster, down from 161 to 182
However, some are doing better, notably University of Durham, up to 92 from 103 last year.

SOURCE: QS
1     University of Cambridge
2     Harvard University    
3     Yale University
4     UCL (University College London)    
5     Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
6     University of Oxford    
7     Imperial College London    
8     University of Chicago
9     California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
10     Princeton University    
11     Columbia University
12     University of Pennsylvania (UPenn)
13     Stanford University    
14     Duke University    
15     University of Michigan    
16     Cornell University    
17     Johns Hopkins University    
18     ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Techno...    
19     McGill University
20     Australian National University (ANU)
21     King's College London (KCL)
22     University of Edinburgh
23     University of Hong Kong (HKU)    
24     University of Tokyo, The    
25     Kyoto University    
26     Northwestern University    
27     University of Bristol    
28     University of California, Berkeley (UCB)    
29     University of Toronto    
30     University of Manchester    
31     National University of Singapore (NUS)    
32     Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
33     École Normale Supérieure de Paris (ENS Paris)    
34     Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
35     University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)    
36     École Polytechnique
37     University of Sydney    
38     University of Melbourne    
39     Brown University    
40     Hong Kong University of Science and Technolog..
41     New York University (NYU)    
42     Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)    
43     University of Queensland (UQ)
44     University of British Columbia (UBC)
45     University of Copenhagen
46     University of New South Wales (UNSW)    
47     Peking University    
48     University of Wisconsin-Madison
49     Osaka University
50     Seoul National University (SNU)    
51     Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
52     Trinity College Dublin     Ireland
53     University of Warwick
54     Tsinghua University    
55     University of Washington    
56     University of Amsterdam    
57     University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill    
58     Technische Universität München (TUM)    
59     University of Birmingham
60     Tokyo Institute of Technology    
61     Monash University    
62     Uppsala University    
63     University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
64     Boston University
65     University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
66     Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU)
67     University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin)
68     University of Auckland    
69     University of Sheffield    
70     Freie Universität Berlin
71     University of Geneva    
72     Lund University    
73     University of Nottingham    
74     Nanyang Technological University (NTU)    
75     University of Helsinki     Finland    
75     Washington University in St. Louis    
77     University of Glasgow    
78     University of Alberta    
79     KAIST - Korea Advanced Institute of Science &...    
80     London School of Economics and Political Scie...
81     University of Southampton    
82     Leiden University    
83     Utrecht University    
84     Aarhus University
85     University of Leeds    
86     Katholieke Universiteit
87     Purdue University    
88     University of York
89     University of Western Australia (UWA)
90     Dartmouth College    
91     Nagoya University    
92     Durham University    
93     Lomonosov Moscow State University    
94     National Taiwan University (NTU)    
95     University of St Andrews    
96     University of Minnesota    
97     Universität Freiburg    
98     Pennsylvania State University (Penn State)    
99     Erasmus University Rotterdam    
100     University of Oslo