US institutions dominate China ranking of top universities

US universities ruled the top 10 spots in a global ranking conducted by a Chinese research centre with Harvard taking the crown for the 13th year.
The top 10 universities were virtually unchanged from last year with Stanford and MIT again coming in second and third, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities released by a centre under Shanghai Jiaotong University.
The University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology remained in the same places -- ranking fourth, sixth and seventh respectively.
Columbia University and University of Chicago came in at eighth and ninth.

University of Cambridge and University of Oxford, the only two non-American universities in the top 10, were fifth and 10th.
The only difference was that last year Chicago and Oxford were tied for ninth place while this year the US establishment held the place alone with the British institution slipping a notch.

The Center of World-Class Universities under Jiaotong University surveys 1,200 universities and picks the top 500 every year.
Though the Chinese organiser claims the ranking to be "the most trustworthy", European officials have in the past criticised it for being biased against Europe's universities as it underemphasise the humanities and stresses sciences.

Only two other non-American institutions, both from Europe, made it into the top 20, with University College London climbing two places from last year to 18th and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich dropping to 20th from 19th but still remaining as the highest-ranked continental European institution.
The organiser, which initially intended to benchmark the performance of Chinese universities, said the result was based on transparent methodology and third-party data.
It said the result was calculated based on several parameters, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals.
For mainland China, Shanghai Jiaotong University itself advanced four places to come in 118th and Peking University climbed to 115th and remained as the highest-ranked school in the country.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the University of Tokyo was 21st and Kyoto University, also in Japan, remained in the same place as last year to come in 26th.