Times Higher Education/QS World University Rankings 2009

Times Higher Education and QS have released their 2010 international university ranking. Based on a combination of research, teaching, international students and faculty, and prestige, the top 200 universities include schools from 32 countries worldwide. U.S. and U.K. universities dominate the rankings (as they do most international rankings) and the top 10 schools are exclusively from the two nations, with Harvard at No. 1 and Cambridge at No. 2. In the top 100, 32 are from the United States and 18 from the United Kingdom, representation from other countries drops off significantly from there--Japan has the third-most universities at six.

Times Higher Education/QS World University Rankings 2009

1. Harvard University, U.S.
2. University of Cambridge, U.K.
3. Yale University, U.S.
4. University College London, U.K.
5. Imperial College London, U.K.
   University of Oxford, U.K.

1. University of Chicago, U.S.
2. Princeton University, U.S.
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.
4. California Institute of Technology, U.S.
5. Columbia University, U.S.
6. University of Pennsylvania, U.S.
7. Johns Hopkins University, U.S.
8. Duke University, U.S.
9. Cornell University, U.S.
10. Stanford University, U.S.
11. Australian National University, Australia
12. McGill University, Canada
13. University of Michigan, U.S.
14. University of Edinburgh, U.K.
    ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Switzerland

1. University of Tokyo, Japan
2. King's College London, U.K.
3. University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
4. Kyoto University, Japan

View the full top 200 ranking on the Times Higher Education website.

Although the Times Higher Education/QS top 100 are very similar to other international university rankings, THE/QS relies more heavily on reputation and prestige when determining their list. 40 percent of the ranking is based on peer-review surveys of academics, and 10 percent is based on surveys of employers asked to rate different institutions--in other words, 50 percent of the ranking is based on external surveys. In its review of the new world ranking, Inside Higher Ed points out that these prestige-based reviews lose credibility in global rankings. "You've got entirely different contexts in different parts of the world, and you don't know what those contexts are," Alisa F. Cunningham, VP of research for the Institute for Higher Education Policy, told the publication.