World's Most Global Universities

People in Nepal are in constant threat of political chaos due to unstable governement , hence students here are always looking for an opportunity overseas and this is understandable. In the huge ocean of Universities around the world, it is very difficult to know where to go, here is a list which should help to some extent the prospective students.


In response to the same forces that have propelled the world economy toward global integration, universities have also become more self-consciously global: seeking students from around the world who represent the entire spec­ trum of cultures and values, sending their own students abroad to prepare them for global careers, offering courses of study that address the challenges of an inter­ connected world and collaborative research programs to advance science for the benefit of all humanity.

To capture these developments, NEWSWEEK devised a ranking of global universities that takes into account openness and diversity, as well as distinction in research.


We evaluated schools on some of the measures used in well-known rankings published by Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Times of London Higher Education Survey. Fifty percent of the score came from equal parts of three measures used by Shanghai Jiatong: the number of highly-cited researchers in various academic fields, the number of articles published in Nature and Science, and the number of articles listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities indices. Another 40 percent of the score came from equal parts of four measures used by the Times: the percentage of international faculty, the percentage of international students, citations per faculty member (using ISI data), and the ratio of faculty to students. The final 10 percent came from library holdings (number of volumes).
Here is our ranking:

The top 23

1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. Yale University
4. California Institute of Technology
5. University of California at Berkeley
6. University of Cambridge
7. Massachusetts Institute Technology

8. Oxford University
9. University of California at San Francisco
10. Columbia University
11. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
12. University of California at Los Angeles
13. University of Pennsylvania
14. Duke University

15. Princeton Universitty
16. Tokyo University
17. Imperial College London
18. University of Toronto
19. Cornell University
20. University of Chicago
21. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
22. University of Washington at Seattle
23. University of California at San Diego


The 2nd 23

24. Johns Hopkins University
25. University College London
26. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
27. University Texas at Austin
28. University of Wisconsin at Madison
29. Kyoto University
30. University of Minnesota Twin Cities
31. University of British Columbia

32. University of Geneva
33. Washington University in St. Louis
34. London School of Economics
35. Northwestern University
36. National University of Singapore
37. University of Pittsburgh
38. Australian National University
39. New York University

40. Pennsylvania State University
41. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
42. McGill University
43. Ecole Polytechnique
44. University of Basel
45. University of Maryland
46. University of Zurich

The 3rd 23

47. University of Edinburgh
48. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
49. University of Bristol
50. University of Sydney
51. University of Colorado at Boulder
52. Utrecht University
53. University of Melbourne

54. University of Southern California
55. University of Alberta
56. Brown University
57. Osaka University
58. University of Manchester
59. University of California at Santa Barbara
60. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

61. Wageningen University 62. Michigan State University 63. University of Munich 64. University of New South Wales 65. Boston University 66. Vanderbilt University 67. University of Rochester 68. Tohoku University 69. University of Hong Kong


The 4th 23

70. University of Sheffield 71. Nanyang Technological University 72. University of Vienna 73. Monash University 74. University of Nottingham 75. Carnegie Mellon University 76. Lund University

77. Texas A&M University 78. University of Western Australia 79. Ecole Normale Super Paris 80. University of Virginia 81. Technical University of Munich 82. Hebrew University of Jerusalem 83. Leiden University

84. University of Waterloo 85. King's College London 86. Purdue University 87. University of Birmingham 88. Uppsala University 89. University of Amsterdam 90. University of Heidelberg

91. University of Queensland 92. University of Leuven 93. Emory University 94. Nagoya University 95. Case Western Reserve University 96. Chinese University of Hong Kong


And the Rest

97. University of Newcastle
98. Innsbruck University
99. University of Massachusetts at Amherst
100. Sussex University

As never before in their long history, universities have become instruments of national competition as well as instruments of peace. They are the locus of the scientific discoveries that move economies forward, and the primary means of educating the talent required to obtain and maintain competitive advantage. But at the same time, the opening of national borders to the flow of goods, services, information and especially people has made universities a powerful force for global integration, mutual understanding and geopolitical stability.


In response to the same forces that have propelled the world economy, universities have become more self-consciously global: seeking students from around the world who represent the entire spectrum of cultures and values, sending their own students abroad to prepare them for global careers, offering courses of study that address the challenges of an interconnected world and collaborative research programs to advance science for the benefit of all humanity.
Of the forces shaping higher education none is more sweeping than the movement across borders.

Over the past three decades the number of students leaving home each year to study abroad has grown at an annual rate of 3.9 percent, from 800,000 in 1975 to 2.5 million in 2004. Most travel from one developed nation to another, but the flow from developing to developed countries is growing rapidly. The reverse flow, from developed to developing countries, is on the rise, too.

Today foreign students earn 30 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded in the United States and 38 percent of those in the United Kingdom. And the number crossing borders for undergraduate study is growing as well, to 8 percent of the undergraduates at America's Ivy League institutions and 10 percent of all undergraduates in the U.K. In the United States, 20 percent of newly hired professors in science and engineering are foreign-born, and in China the vast majority of newly hired faculty at the top research universities received their graduate education abroad.

What are the consequences of these shifts among the highly educated? Consider this: on the night after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Jewish students at Yale (most of them American) came together with Muslim students (most of them foreign) to organize a vigil. Or this: every year the student-run Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford (FACES) organizes conferences in both China and at Stanford, bringing together students from both countries chosen to discuss Sino-U.S. relations with leading experts.

The leaders of student groups promoting international collaboration are in touch with each other daily via e-mail and Skype, technologies that not only facilitate cooperative projects but also increase the likelihood of creating lifelong personal ties. The bottom line: the flow of students across national borders(I¡½(Bstudents who are disproportionately likely to become leaders in their home countries(I¡½(Benables deeper mutual understanding, tolerance and global integration.


As part of this, universities are encouraging students to spend some of their undergraduate experience in another country. In Europe, more than 140,000 students participate in the Erasmus program each year, taking courses for credit in one of 2,200 participating institutions across the continent. And in the United States, institutions are mobilizing their alumni to help place students in summer internships abroad to prepare them for global careers.

Yale and Harvard have led the way, offering every undergraduate at least one international study or internship opportunity(I¡½(Band providing the financial resources to make it possible. Universities are also establishing more-ambitious foreign outposts to serve students primarily from the local market rather than the parent campus. And true educational joint ventures are gaining favor, such as the 20-year-old Johns Hopkins-Nanjing program in Chinese and American Studies, the Duke Goethe executive M.B.A. program and the MIT-Singapore alliance, which offers dual graduate degrees in a variety of engineering fields.


Globalization is also reshaping the way research is done. One new trend involves sourcing portions of a research program to another country. Yale professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Tian Xu directs a research center focused on the genetics of human disease at his alma mater, Shanghai's Fudan University, in collaboration with faculty colleagues from both schools. The Shanghai center has 95 employees and graduate students working in a 4,300-square-meter laboratory facility. Yale faculty, postdocs and graduate students visit regularly and attend videoconference seminars with scientists from both campuses.


The arrangement benefits both countries; Xu's Yale lab is more productive, thanks to the lower costs of conducting research in China, and Chinese graduate students, postdocs and faculty get on-the-job training from a world-class scientist and his U.S. team.

Yale has a similar facility at Peking University in Beijing, where Prof. Xing-Wang Deng directs a program studying the biology of plant systems, aimed at improving crops. Like Xu, Deng is a graduate of the institution where he performs his research. But it is only a matter of time before China starts to set up similar facilities for outstanding foreign scientists who have no prior connection to the country.


Given NEWSWEEK's rankings, it's not surprising that nations seeking advancement are looking closely at America's research universities as a model. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological change has been the principal source of economic growth and a rising standard of living. But in the past half century, technological progress has become dependent on scientific advances and their translation to practice(I¡½(Ba process that requires both public and private investment. After the second world war, the United States recognized that maintaining its leadership in defense technology required substantial public investment in university-based science. By the mid-1950s the United States had designated public support for university research for the basic sciences as well as for health, agriculture, defense and energy.

As a result of its strength in science, the United States has consistently led the world in the commercialization of major new technologies, from the mainframe computer and the integrated circuit of the 1960s to the Internet infrastructure and applications software of the 1990s.

The link between university-based science and industrial application is often indirect but sometimes highly visible: Silicon Valley was intentionally created by Stanford University, and Route 128 outside Boston has long housed companies spun off from MIT and Harvard. Around the world, governments have encouraged replication of this model, perhaps most successfully in Cambridge, England, where Microsoft and scores of other leading software and biotechnology companies have set up shop around the university.

An impressive array of technology companies already surrounds some of the major campuses in China(I¡½(Bnotably Peking and Tsinghua universities in Beijing, and Fudan and Shanghai Jiatong universities in Shanghai.

Universities are also adapting more American research practices. Until recently, for instance, Japan allocated research funding in block grants, which wound up in the hands of the country's most senior(I¡½(Bbut not necessarily most productive(I¡½(Bprofessors. But between 2000 and 2004, the country increased the volume of grants subject to competitive review by 57 percent, in an effort to direct funding to the more meritorious.


Even more-dramatic changes are taking place in China, where a number of leading universities, intent on attaining world-class status, have been carefully studying America's top institutions for new ideas. These include widening the search for new faculty well beyond their own graduates, establishing rigorous standards for awarding lifetime tenure and consulting with independent experts on personnel decisions. Several leading universities have ditched the traditional specialized undergraduate curriculum for a year or two of general education followed by free choice of a major field of study, as is common in the United States. Some are experimenting with using criteria other than national exams to admit students. And many elite universities are determined to abandon recitation in favor of classroom interaction that encourages students to think independently(I¡½(Ba hopeful sign for those eager to see a fully democratic China.


Indeed, China is intent on playing all its cards. By investing heavily in research, tripling university enrollments between 1998 and 2004, and encouraging top students to think independently, the country is self-consciously using its universities as a means to stimulate economic growth. At the same time, since Deng Xiaoping first permitted Chinese students to seek education in the West in 1978, no country has made a more deliberate effort to send its most talented students abroad for a top education(I¡½(Bespecially at the graduate level. Today, in contrast to 10 or 20 years ago when economic opportunity was limited at home, most Chinese students return after graduation(I¡½(Boften with an appreciation of the values of a free society and a greater understanding of the countries where they studied.


Europe, by contrast, has lost its competitive edge. According to "The Future of European Universities: Renaissance or Decay?" a devastating recent critique by Confederation of British Industry Director General Richard Lambert and Nick Butler, Chief of Strategic Planning at British Petroleum, European governments have systematically weakened their top universities, once the pride of the world. They have invested too little in research, spread limited resources across too many institutions, expanded enrollments without increasing faculty and refused to allow universities sufficient autonomy, the report says. To flourish, they need to concentrate more resources in the hands of the strongest universities and allow them to generate revenue by charging tuition fees like their U.S. counterparts(I¡½(Band awarding financial aid to those in greatest need.


For all its success, the United States remains deeply ambivalent about sustaining the research-university model. Most politicians recognize the link between investment in science and national economic strength, but support for research funding has been fitful and sporadic rather than steady. The budget of the National Institutes of Health doubled between 1998 and 2003, but has risen more slowly than inflation since then. Support for the physical sciences and engineering barely kept pace with inflation during that same period; legislation to double these expenditures in 10 years is currently pending. The attempt to make up lost ground is welcome, but the nation would be better served by steady, predictable increases in science funding at the rate of long-term GDP growth, which is on the order of inflation plus 3 percent per year.


American politicians have great difficulty recognizing that admitting more foreign students can greatly promote the national interest by increasing international understanding. Adjusted for inflation, public funding for international exchanges and foreign-language study is well below the levels of 40 years ago. In the wake of September 11, changes in the visa process caused a dramatic decline in the number of foreign students seeking admission to U.S. universities, and a corresponding surge in enrollments in Australia, Singapore and the U.K. Objections from American university and business leaders led to improvements in the process and a reversal of the decline, but the United States is still seen by many as unwelcoming to international students. An abortive attempt last year by the Commerce Department to extend the scope of export control regulations in university research labs reinforced this unfortunate signal.



Most Americans recognize that universities contribute to the nation's well-being through their scientific research, but many fear that foreign students threaten American competitiveness by taking their knowledge and skills back home. They fail to grasp that welcoming foreign students to the United States has two overriding positive effects: first, the very best of them stay in the States and(I¡½(Blike immigrants throughout history(I¡½(Bstrengthen the nation; and second, foreign students who study in the United States become ambassadors for many of its most cherished values when they return home. Or at least they understand them better. In America as elsewhere, few instruments of foreign policy are as effective in promoting peace and stability as welcoming international university students.
Levin is the president of Yale University.