Top new university ranking: 50 under 50 degrees north

An exciting new league table! Both QS and THE have, rather unimaginatively, produced rankings of universities under 50 years old. More exciting alternative rankings here have offered the highly creative 20 over 500 and 30 under six but this new not at all arbitrary league table draws not on age but on the inescapable facts of … Continued

An exciting new league table!

Both QS and THE have, rather unimaginatively, produced rankings of universities under 50 years old. More exciting alternative rankings here have offered the highly creative 20 over 500 and 30 under six but this new not at all arbitrary league table draws not on age but on the inescapable facts of geography to sort the best from the rest. It’s 50 under 50 degrees north!

The new latitude-led league table has been slammed as outrageous by northern Europeans in particular and described by UK universities as a stitch up by the US and central and southern Europeans. Those south of the equator have been similarly appalled.

“We’re all used to US dominance but this is ridiculous” said an Australian Vice-Chancellor who, remarkably, did not wish to be named.

There are some extraordinary results and ETH is the only non North American university in Top 20. There is also a reasonable showing from Eastern institutions which are not too far north. In a desperate attempt to appear in the table several UK universities claimed to have campuses on Jersey but these turned out on investigation by our researchers to be the offices of tax advisors.

Details of the scoring methodology are restricted to prevent manipulation so there are no grounds to complain of unfairness:

1 Harvard University
2 California Institute of Technology
3 Stanford University
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
5 Princeton University
6 Yale University
7 University of California, Berkeley
8 University of Chicago
9 ETH Zürich
10 Columbia University
11 University of Pennsylvania
12 University of California, Los Angeles
13 Johns Hopkins University
14 Cornell University
15 University of Michigan
16 Northwestern University
17 University of Toronto
18 Carnegie Mellon University
19 Duke University
20 Georgia Institute of Technology

21 University of Tokyo
22 University of Washington
23 University of British Columbia
24 University of Wisconsin-Madison
25 University of Texas at Austin
26 University of Hong Kong
27 National University of Singapore
28 University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
29 McGill University
30 University of California, Santa Barbara
31 University of Minnesota
32 École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
33 University of California, San Diego
34 New York University
35 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
36 University of California, Davis
37 Peking University
38 Washington University in St Louis
39 Tsinghua University
40 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
41 Brown University
42 Ohio State University
43 Kyoto University
44 Boston University
45 Seoul National University
46 École Normale Supérieure
47 Pennsylvania State University
48 École Polytechnique
49 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
50 University of Geneva