IIT joins league of 100 best varsities

New Delhi: The Indian Institute of Technology has made it to the league of best universities in the world while Oxbridge claimed second and third place in a survey of top 100 universities in the world published on Wednesday.

Both Cambridge and Oxford were beaten by the American 'Ivy League' rival Harvard while two British universities leapfrogged over US rivals - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and Stanford - to claim prized positions.

India's IIT is ranked 57th; Imperial College, London, graduated to No. 9 while London School of Economics and University College London and Edinburgh made it among the top 30 in the latest Times Higher Education Supplement - QS World University Rankings.

The University of California at Berkeley is placed eighth and Princeton University is ranked 10th.

As many as 39 European universities appear in the top 100, with UK's share alone being a record 29 (last year it was 23). Among the top 200, Europe's share has gone up to 86.

The rankings were based on the results of a survey of 3,703 academics from across the world, spanning various disciplines.

'The latest THES - QS World University Rankings underline the fierce competition between leading universities across the world. Although Harvard is still at the top, the gap between it and its nearest rivals has closed markedly and there are a lot of changes further down the table," London's Evening Standard newspaper quoted John O'Leary, the editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement, as saying.

The highest-ranking Asian university was Beijing University, coming in at 15th - also the highest rank for a non-US or British institution.

Australian National University was Australia's best at 16th, while France's Ecole Normale Superieure was continental Europe's best at 18th.

33) University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong) 46) University of Auckland (New Zealand) 54) University of Copenhagen (Denmark) 57) Indian Institute of Technology (India) 58) Universitaet Heidelberg (Germany) 63) Seoul National University (South Korea) 67) Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands) 74) University Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (Mexico) 76) Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) 78) Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) 87) University of Vienna (Austria) 93) Moscow State University (Russia)