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Top 20 universities in the world

Posted on Saturday, March 8 at 4:00am | By Nanette Asimov

The top 20 universities in the world

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20. University of Toronto

UC Berkeley is fond of calling itself the best university in the world. And even though Caltech ranks #1 — again — on this year’s World University Rankings released by Times Higher Education, UC Berkeley can still claim to be the best.

Best American public university, that is.

Sure, it’s #8 among 400 universities across the planet that are ranked according to teaching, research, “knowledge transfer” — I had to look it up, too — and international outlook. But the only American universities that out-rank it are swanky private ones: California Institute of Technology (1); Harvard (tied for 2nd with University of Oxford, a sort-of public school in England); #3 is oddly missing; Stanford (4); MIT (5); Princeton (6); and the University of Cambridge, also a quasi-public school in England (7).

After that there’s UC Berkeley, which has inched up in the rankings (9th last year and 10th the year before.) It wasn’t founded in the 13th century like the British universities. And its endowment isn’t $30 billion, like Harvard’s. It’s $3 billion. But Berkeley does let folks in for free if their family earns less than $80,000. True, they have to be the smartest, most accomplished person in their high school. But that’s true for everyone there.

None of that was in the rankings.

Other noteworthy features of this year’s rankings: Turkey has a university in the top 200. It’s called Bogazici U., and it’s listed 199th.

Iceland and Iran both have schools listed in the 251th to 275th group (they stop individual rankings after 200). They’re the University of Iceland and Sharif University of Technology.

The University of Tartu in Estonia and a pair of Saudia Arabian schools named for kings made the list in the final 50: King Saud and King Abdulaziz. So did the University of Tasmania in Australia.