London, Sep 12 : Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has 77 Nobel Laureates among its faculty, has gained the number one spot in the list of world's top 100 universities compiled under QS World University Rankings.
Several universities from China, South Korea, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong feature in the list, but not a single Indian institution is among the top hundred.
MIT displaced the likes of Harvard and Cambridge for the No 1 ranking. While Harvard was no. 1 from 2004 to 2009 every year, Cambridge grabbed the top slot for 2010 and 2011. The laurels this time go to MIT.
In 2007, MIT was at the 10th spot. Now, it is a nerve centre of cutting-edge academic research, says a Telegraph report.
Founded in 1861, MIT has been at the heart of seminal breakthroughs in disciplines such as engineering, physics, mathematics and computer science. Perhaps its most famous current faculty member, the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, has been named among the top 10 most cited scholars of all time.
Strong across the range of indicators, MIT is propelled to the top of the overall table this year by its high-impact research, and its unusually high proportion of academic staff, says the DT report.
With tiny margins separating institutions at the top of the table, its superior performance for research citations and lower student-to-staff ratio push it above second-placed University of Cambridge. MIT has also taken steps to internationalise its student and staff bodies, an area of comparative weakness in the past.
With an undergraduate student body around half the size of Cambridge University's, MIT students benefit from intensive teaching and small class sizes. At postgraduate level it is rigorously selective, with less than 10 per cent of applicants admitted.
These high standards are acknowledged in a poll of 25,000 employers, contributing 10 per cent of the rankings score. MIT graduates are identified as some of the most sought-after in the world.
MIT trails Cambridge and Harvard in the QS academic reputation survey, in which 46,000 academics worldwide identify the leading universities within their field. This is designed to give equal weight to the full range of academic disciplines, so MIT's comparatively narrow focus is an obvious disadvantage.
However, whereas Cambridge and Harvard excel in a greater range of disciplines, when it comes to science and technology MIT is about as good as it gets.
