Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT and Cambridge are the top 5 best universities in the world, according to the newest ranking released by the Center for World-Class Universities at the Chinese Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
The list of top 10 educational institutions includes also Caltech, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford.
What the ranking shows is that Europe lags behind– only two universities (both British) find a place in the first 10 of the Chinese ranking. Even more disappointing is to discover that only one more European institution, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, finds place in the list of top 20.
Conclusion: Only three non-American institutions made it into the top 20.
The Chinese rank the technology institute in Zurich as the best university in continental Europe, followed by Pierre and Marie Curie University in France, otherwise occupying 37th position in the overall ranking.
The Shanghai academic ranking of world universities is by far not the only classification of educational institutions which signals that something must be going wrong with the competitiveness of the European universities on a global scale.
According to a ranking standardising the international university performance comparisons released in April, among the top 100 universities in the world, only 31 come from Europe, 12 of them from the UK and out of the top 15, only four are European, three of them UK and all the others are US based.
Earlier this year, the Times Higher Education magazine issued its World Reputation Rankings, assigning top positions to only five institutions - University of Cambridge, Oxford, the Imperial College London, as well as University College London and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich.