University of Oxford (United Kingdom)

Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley occupy the first three places of the Shanghai ranking. The first French University Pierre and Marie Curie, moved up to 39th place while Chinese universities are appearing for the first time in the first hundred of the ranking.

American universities continue to prance leading the Shanghai ranking published Monday. For the fourteenth consecutive year, Harvard arrives in 2016 at the head of the top 500 universities in the world conducted by the independent firm Shanghai Ranking Consultancy.

The first three places on the podium (and eight of the top ten ranking) are also occupied by US universities, since Stanford ranks second to last year, followed by Berkeley who wins a spot. First non-American, the British University Cambridge arrives 4th or one better than in 2015. Then there are the American MIT (5th) that goes down two places, and Princeton (6th like last year).
Six criteria considered

The Shanghai ranking, created in 2003, takes into account six criteria to distinguish 500 of the 1,200 establishments listed in the world, the number of Nobel among alumni, the number of highly cited researchers in their discipline or the number of publications in "Science" and "Nature". If the firm describes the ranking as "the most reliable", criteria oriented research and the life sciences, obscuring among other human and social sciences, are denounced by many European officials as a harmful way for their establishments.

Thus, only four other non-American institutions reach the top 20: Oxford in 7th place (13), University College London in 17th place (1), the Zurich Federal Institute of Technology (Switzerland) in 19th place (+1) and the University of Tokyo in 20th (one well).
22 French schools in the top 500

French side, the University Pierre and Marie Curie (39th), Paris-Sud (46th) and the Ecole Normale Superieure (87th) rank among the first hundred. The French State Secretary for Higher Education and Research Thierry Mandon welcomed the maintenance of 22 institutions of his country in the first 500, which puts it in 6th position behind the United States, China , Germany, the UK and Australia.

This year marks the entrance, for the first time, Chinese universities in the first hundred of the ranking, with Tsinghua (58th) and Beijing (71). Singapore also reaches the Top 100, with the National University of Singapore in the 83rd position.

But the ranking has remained largely unchanged at the top, with nine of the top 20 universities have maintained their position, and nine are raised or lowered by one notch.