Times Higher Education has released the 2020 World University Rankings, and Oxford was named the best university for a fourth consecutive year.
Oxford University is traditionally one of the best higher education institutions in the world. Their continued efforts to offer high-quality education and experience for their students is undeniable. Just recently, Oxford partnered with L&G to expand and improve the university’s housing areas.
Oxford And Cambridge are long-time rivals when it comes to the number one spot as the best university, however, for the past several years, Cambridge has been falling in the ranking.
This year, Cambridge has lost one more position and has ranked in third place, compared to 2018, when Oxford was first, and Cambridge was second.
The new runner-up in the Times Higher Education ranking is the California Institute of Technology.
How is the best university chosen?
In order to determine what is the position of each university on the scale of best to worst, Times Higher Education uses a plethora of different criteria.
The bulk of the decision is based upon each university’s performance in thirteen precisely created indicators. The most important of these indicators include the fields of teaching covered by university programs, research efforts, and preparedness, and the number of quality citations coming out of the faculty team.
While the ranking mechanism is very complex, the top ten of the universities remains largely similar over the past several years.
This years’ top ten is as follows:
Source: Times Higher Education
One interesting trend analyzers have noticed about the 2020 ranking is that most of the top ten universities are located in the United States.
This highlights a genuine crisis with higher education in the United Kingdom, with many of its top universities dropping out of the world’s top ten.
Some specialists say that the drop in positions for the majority of British universities is somewhat affected by the country’s decision to leave the European Union. Brexit has created not only political tension but has also affected exchange programs and Erasmus students.
