Skip to footer

World rankings: Top 10 universities in 2014

If there is a one city in the world that can claim to be the global capital of higher education, it’s London, which has a staggering five of the world’s top 100 universities within its city limits. 

This according to popular ranking of the world’s universities put out this week by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a British-based higher education consulting firm.

Overall, the United Kingdom has 19 universities in the top 100 on the company’s World University Ranking, topped only by the United States, with 28.

Several prestigious Asian universities have been rising rapidly through the list in recent years, led by the National University of Singapore (#22). The top universities in South America — the Universidade de São Paulo — and Africa — the University of Cape Town — are trending upward as well, though neither has yet cracked the top 100.

In general, a ranking of global educational institutions is highly subjective, and must be taken with a large grain of salt, warns Simon Marginson, a professor of international higher education at the University of London and the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Higher Education. In particular, he notes, the QS ranking leans heavily on “global reputation,” a murky metric determined by surveying a selection of academics from around the world about which universities in their field are the most reputable.

“No one in the higher education sector really believes that the QS ranking tells them anything about performance,” Dr. Marginson says. “But they do know it’s important in a marketing sense.” 

Still, the QS rankings remain closely watched by both universities and prospective students and lecturers around the world.

Here are this year’s top 10 schools.

#10: Yale University

Michelle McLoughlin/File
A woman walks through the Old Campus at Yale University in New Haven, Conn.

Although not exactly hurting for prestige, Yale has been on the decline in the QS ranking for several years, sliding from third in 2010 to seventh in 2012 to 10th on the latest list. Never mind though, since it is still among the top five universities in the world for the study of English, history and archeology, law, languages, politics, and psychology. Not to mention, three of the past four US presidents — Bill Clinton and both George Bushes — received either undergraduate or graduate degrees at the New Haven, Conn., school.

1 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.