Oxford has beaten Cambridge in the 2019 QS World University Rankings, placing among the top five universities worldwide.
According to the rankings, Oxford is the UK’s best university and the 5th best university globally. It is the first time since 2015 that Oxford has ranked in the top five institutions globally.
Oxford and Cambridge have swapped positions in the rankings this year, with Oxford rising from 6th place to 5th and Cambridge dropping from 5th to 6th.
US universities retain the top four positions; MIT topped the table followed by Stanford, Harvard, and CalTech respectively.
QS ranks the world’s top 1,000 universities, which typically come from over 85 countries.
Oxford’s rise is mostly due to an improvement in its research performance. Its score for Citations per Faculty – QS’s measure of research impact – rose from 76.3/100 in last year’s edition to 83.0/100 this year. It also retained a score of 100/100 for Employer Reputation.
| QS World University Rankings 2019: Top 10 |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) |
| Stanford University |
| Harvard University |
| California Institute of Technology (Caltech) |
| University of Oxford |
| University of Cambridge |
| ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) |
| Imperial College London |
| University of Chicago |
| UCL (University College London) |
Oxford vice chancellor, Louise Richardson, said: “I am delighted that Oxford has risen in this year’s QS rankings. We owe this result to the talent and commitment of our academic staff and to our network of research collaborators across the continent and across the Globe. We are particularly proud to have secured the top spot in Europe and very much hope that we will be able to maintain this position as the UK withdraws from the European Union.”
A QS spokesperson, Jack Moran, said: “This year’s results reiterate Oxford’s status as a truly world-class institution in all respects. It enjoys outstanding renown among both academics and employers.
“Its highly international status is testament to its global standing. And no university in the country achieves a higher raw research impact, with its citations footprint higher than all others.
“However, for students at the university, it is equally important that the world-renowned tutorial system remains facilitated by one of the world’s lowest faculty-student ratios: in this respect, Oxford is relatively – and happily – anomalous among UK institutions, the majority of whom are suffering from increasing class sizes.”
