According to news report, the 2007 ranking of the world’s best universities by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiaotong University was recently released, with Harvard on the top. This ranking is known in some places as “the Shanghai Ranking”, and it is mainly based on six categories of criteria including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel and other academic prizes or having their research work published in domestic or the world’s top academic journals.

By this ranking, among the top ten on the list, eight are American universities including Stanford, MIT, and Princeton. The Cambridge and Oxford in Britain secured the fourth and tenth places. Out of the top 100 best universities, 54 are located in the United States, 31 are in Europe, and nine in the Asia and Pacific region. Tsinghua University and Peking University, the most renowned two universities in the Chinese mainland, ranked 167 and 228 respectively, lagging behind the 161st Taiwan University.