OXFORD: #1 in "Times" Uni Rankings

Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson.

The (London) Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings rates Oxford in first place this year.

Oxford displaces CalTech, which has dominated the list in the last five years and before but is now is second place. The next three were Stanford, Cambridge and MIT.

THE Rankings are the only audited global inter-university comparisons. Audit of THE Rankings was by PwC. 

The ranking is based on the following factors, with their weights:

• teaching 30% (based on reputation, staff-student ratio etc.),
• research 30%,
• citations 30%,
• international outlook 7.5%,
• industry income 2.5%.

Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson, who has taken over since January 2016 as Oxford's CEO,  welcomed the news and said in a recent speech:

The ranking is even more impressive when one realises that we are far less wealthy than most of our global competitors. The endowment of the entire university–colleges and university together–is less than one-sixth of Harvard’s  [$38 billion in 2015] and a quarter of Stanford’s, Yale’s, and Princeton’s.

The rankings are dominated by U.S. universities, which account for 63 of the top 200. Asian universities improved their rankings, with 19 now in the top 200.