Peking University, Beijing, Sept. 17, 2010: The Times Higher Education (THE) officially issued the 2010-11 world university rankings on Sept. 16. Two universities on the Chinese mainland are among the top 50, with Peking University ranking 37th, and University of Science and Technology of China 49th. The top five are all US universities. They are Harvard University, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Princeton University. University of Cambridge and University of Oxford in the UK both rank sixth. There are altogether 72 US universities, 29 British universities, and 14 Chinese universities (including four of Hong Kong and four of Taiwan) among the top 200.

The Times Higher Education and the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS, a higher education investigatory institution) have cooperated to issue world university rankings, which have now become one of the most influential and acknowledged ranking systems since 2004. The annual rankings are widely reprinted by media such as the US News & World Report . In 2010, the Times Higher Education worked with the world-famous information provider Thomson Reuters to improve the original university ranking system. They launched a brand new ranking scheme in 2010, which mainly employs 13 separate performance indicators that are brought into five headline categories — teaching (30%), research (30%), citation (32.5%), industry income (2.5%), and international mix (5%).

According to another source, the Quacquarelli Symonds has recently issued another version of 2010 world university rankings independently. Peking University ranks 47th according to that list, which is the only university on the Chinese mainland entering the world’s top 50.

Translated by: PAN Huanming
Edited by: Jacques
Source: PKU News (Chinese)