The world’s top 10 universities

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology takes the top spot of the 2015/16 QS World University Rankings, with a perfect score of 100 out of 100.

The ranking analyses the performance of more than 800 of the world’s universities based on six key performance indicators: academic reputation, employer reputation, student-to-faculty ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty ratio and international student ratio.

MIT is followed by Harvard in second place, two places higher than last year. The University of Cambridge and Stanford take joint third place – a fall of one place for the British institution, but a rise of four places for the California-based university. All three scored in excess of 98.5 this year.

The changes in position since the 2014/15 rankings are largely caused by a change in the way the scores are calculated: they now take into account the different levels of citations in various faculty areas. QS says this has made the ranking more balanced.

The 2015/16 top 10 is almost entirely comprised of American and British institutions, with the duopoly broken only by ETH Zurich in ninth place.

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Author: Joe Myers is a Digital Content Producer at Formative Content. 

Image: Graduating senior Indiana Seresin blows bubbles before the 364th Commencement Exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts May 28, 2015. REUTERS/Brian Snyder