MIT...THE WORLD LEADER

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has emerged as the leading varsity in the world with no Indian institution featuring in the top 200, according to a global university ranking released today. The top-placed Indian institution, the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B), is 222nd in the world, followed by IIT-Delhi at 235th, IIT-Kanpur at 300th, IIT-Madras at 322nd and IIT-Kharagpur at 324th position in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings . The number of Indian institutions in the rankings has grown to 12 from 11. The other Indian educational institutions that were given a rank lower than 400 on the list of over 700 top universities are -- University of Delhi, IIT-Roorkee, IIT-Guwahati, University of Mumbai, University of Kolkata, Banaras Hindu University, University of Pune. A total of 31 countries are represented in the top 200 in which the US is the dominant nation, with 51 institutions, ahead of the UK (29), Germany (13), the Netherlands (11), Canada (10), Japan (10) and Australia (8). The QS World University Rankings, regarded as the most rigorous of its type, place Imperial and Cambridge as second equal, behind only the MIT which topped the rankings for a third year in a row. Harvard dropped from second to fourth overall. It was followed by Oxford and University College London in joint fifth place, with Stanford, Caltech, Princeton and Yale of the US filling out the rest of the top 10. Kings College London, Edinburgh, Bristol and Manchester universities are all in the top 30, capping the best performance by British institutions in the 10 years the QS rankings have been published. Ben Sowter, head of research at QS, said the top 10 had excellent academic reputations, graduate recruitment, staff- student ratios and international reach for faculty and students. London has five in QS's top 100, compared with three for Boston and Hong Kong, and two for New York, Paris and Tokyo. Graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were rated as the world's most employable, with LSE graduates also highly regarded. Cambridge was the best performing British institution for total research citations, an area heavily dominated by the more wealthy US universities, according to the rankings. The QS World University Rankings is an annual league table ranking universities as a result of performance in four key areas: research, teaching, employability and internationalisation.