New Rankings Show The Best Universities In The World: MIT Ranks First, Harvard In Second

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The most widely read university rankings have just been updated for 2013/14. The QS World University Rankings are compiled annually by Quacquarelli Symonds. QS considers more than 2,000 institutions worldwide and ranks more than 800 to determine the best colleges and universities in the world.

If you haven’t looked at university rankings in more than a few years, the list may surprise you.

The top university is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a perfect score of 100. Harvard University moved into second place, overtaking the University of Cambridge since last year. Other familiar names at the top include Oxford, Stanford and Yale.

Only 11 of the top 20 are in the United States, with the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Canada also appearing at the top.

Here are the top 20 schools according to the QS World University Rankings:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2. Harvard University
3. University of Cambridge
4. UCL (University College London)
5. Imperial College London
6. University of Oxford
7. Stanford University
8. Yale University
9. University of Chicago
10. (tie) California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
10. (tie) Princeton University
12. ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)
13. University of Pennsylvania
14. Columbia University
15. Cornell University
16. Johns Hopkins University
17. (tie) University of Edinburgh
17. (tie) University of Toronto
19. (tie) Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
19. (tie) King’s College London (KCL)

The complete list is searchable and allows you to filter results by region or faculty. QS gives additional rankings based on faculty, subject and city. It also gives full profiles of each school.

View the complete list of 800 schools on the QS site.