Top 10 universities in the world – 2008

Today we’re going to get little educational; we’ll be listing the top 10 universities in the world – 2008. The list has kept changing in the years, so we’d be listing it for the year 2008. There are many factors which would decide which college would be the best. It involves, students’ review, employers’ review, the international students’ score, and international staff score. The one that does better in all of these comes up in the list. Here it is, top 10 universities in the world – 2008.

10. Columbia University

In our list of top 10 universities in the world – 2008, Columbia University is considered to be the tenth best university with a peer review score of 100. Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia’s main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City. The institution was established as King’s College by the Church of England, receiving a Royal Charter in 1754 from George II of Great Britain. One of only two universities in the United States to have been founded by royal charter, it was the only college established in the Province of New York. Each year Columbia grants the prestigious Pulitzer Prizes, and more Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with Columbia than with any other university in the world.

Notable Alumni
The current President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, as well as two former Presidents of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, attended Columbia. Obama graduated in 1983. Neither of the Roosevelts earned a degree; it was common at the time for young men to enter the bar after completing only a year or two of legal education. Nine Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States have studied at the University and 39 Nobel Prize winners have obtained degrees from Columbia. Alumni also have received more than 20 National Book Awards and 95 Pulitzer Prizes.

9. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology slides from tenth position(2007) to ninth position(2008) in the list of top 10 universities in the world – 2008. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research. MIT is one of two private land-grant universities and is also a sea-grant and space-grant university.

Founded by William Barton Rogers in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, the university adopted the German university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Its current 168-acre (68.0 ha) campus opened in 1916 and extends over 1 mile (1.6 km) along the northern bank of the Charles River basin. MIT researchers were involved in efforts to develop computers, radar, and inertial guidance in connection with defense research during World War II and the Cold War. In the past 60 years, MIT’s educational programs have expanded beyond the physical sciences and engineering into social sciences like economics, philosophy, linguistics, political science, and management.

Notable Alumni
Many of MIT’s over 110,000 alumni and alumnae have had considerable success in scientific research, public service, education, and business. 26 MIT alumni have won the Nobel Prize and 37 have been selected as Rhodes Scholars. MIT alumni founded or co-founded many notable companies, such as Intel, McDonnell Douglas, Texas Instruments, 3Com, Qualcomm, Bose, Raytheon, Koch Industries, Rockwell International, Genentech, and Campbell Soup. Noted alumni in non-scientific fields include Doctor Dolittle author Hugh Lofting, Boston guitarist Tom Scholz, The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, The Bell Curve author Charles Murray, United States Supreme Court building architect Cass Gilbert, and Pritzker Prize-winning architect I.M. Pei.

8. University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago and stands eighth in the list of top 10 universities in the world – 2008. Although an older university by the same name existed prior to its founding, the modern University of Chicago credits its establishment to the oil magnate and benefactor John D. Rockefeller, traditionally dating its founding to July 1, 1891 when William Rainey Harper became the university’s president.

Affiliated with 82 Nobel Prize laureates, the University of Chicago is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost universities. Known for its rigorous devotion to academic scholarship and intellectual life, it was one of the first universities in the United States to be conceived as a combination of an American liberal arts college and a German research university.

Notable Alumni
Barack Obama – President of the United States
General John Ashcroft, Ramsey Clark, and Edward H. Levi – former U.S. Attorneys
Paul Wolfowitz – former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State and former head of the World Bank
Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Robert Lucas – Nobel Prize-winning economists
T. S. Eliot - Nobel Prize-winning modernist poet and dramatist
Susan Sontag – essayist, award-winning novelist, film maker, poet, and activist
Albert Michelson, Robert Millikan, Arthur Compton, and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar – Nobel Prize-winning physicists
Enrico Fermi – Nobel Prize-winning physicist and developer of the first nuclear reactor
Edwin Hubble – astronomer and pioneer of physical cosmology
James Watson – Nobel-prize winning molecular biologist and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA
Mike Nichols – Academy Award-winning film director

7. University College London

With the alumni ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to Alexander Graham Bell, University College London stands seventh in the top 10 universities in the world – 2008. University College London (UCL) is a university institution and constituent college of the University of London based primarily in London, England, United Kingdom. It was founded in 1826, as London University, and was the first university institution to be founded in London, the first British university to be established on an entirely secular basis, and the first British university to admit students regardless of their religion and gender. UCL is a member of the elite Russell Group of Universities, a part of the ‘G5′ sub-group of super-elite UK universities, and a part of the Golden Triangle.
According to the UK university league tables, UCL is one of the UK’s top three multi-faculty universities (along with the universities of Oxford and Cambridge). According to The Guardian newspaper, King’s College London, the London School of Economics, Imperial College London and University College London, each ‘have international reputations that in this country only Oxbridge can beat.

Notable Alumni
UCL alumni include both ‘the Great and the Good’, ranging from Mahatma Gandhi and Alexander Graham Bell, to Ricky Gervais and all four members of the band Coldplay, as well as two members of the band Keane, Tim Rice-Oxley and Richard Hughes. Important authors include Stella Gibbons, Robert Browning, Rabindranath Tagore (did not graduate), Raymond Briggs and G. K. Chesterton. Christopher Nolan, director of “The Dark Knight” and other notable movies, is also an alumnus. UCL has the highest number of academics of any university in the UK. Currently among UCL academics there are 35 fellows of the Royal Society, 27 Fellows of the British Academy, and 77 Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences. 20 Nobel prizes have been awarded to UCL academics and students (ten of which were in Physiology & Medicine) as well as three Fields Medals.

6. Imperial College London

On sixth position among the top 10 universities in the world – 2008, we have Imperial College London. Imperial College London is a British university in London specializing in science, engineering, medicine and business.Imperial’s main campus is located in South Kensington in central London, on the boundary between the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the City of Westminster, with its front entrance on Exhibition Road. Formerly a constituent college of the University of London, Imperial became independent of the university on 8 July 2007, the 100th anniversary of its founding.

Notable Alumni
Imperial alumni include physicist Abdus Salam, biologist T. H. Huxley, pharmacologist Alexander Fleming and optics pioneer Harold Hopkins, alongside Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, author H. G. Wells, Ferrari Chief Designer Nicholas Tombazis and Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May.

5. The California Institute of Technology

Moving from the seventh position (2007), The California Institute of Technology occupies the fifth position in the top 10 universities in the world – 2008 list. The California Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Caltech) is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. The Institute maintains a strong emphasis on the natural sciences and engineering, and operates and manages NASA’s neighboring Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Academics at Caltech emphasize quality over size, concentrating on a core of academic disciplines of very high caliber. Caltech is also known for interdisciplinary programs facilitated by the small physical size of the Caltech campus.
One of the interesting annual event is “Ditch Day”. On Ditch Day the seniors ditch school, leaving behind elaborately designed tasks and traps at the doors of their rooms to prevent underclassmen from entering. Over the years this has evolved to the point where many seniors spend months designing mechanical, electrical, and software obstacles to confound the underclassmen. In 2007, Ditch Day fell on May 15. In 2008, on May 21. Another interesting event is “Millikan pumpkin-drop experiment” which the Dabney House conducts from the top of Millikan Library, the highest point on campus on every Halloween.
Caltech students have been known for the many pranks (also known as RFs) they have pulled off.The two most famous are the changing of the Hollywood Sign to read Caltech, by judiciously covering up certain parts of the letters, and the changing of the Rose Bowl scoreboard to an imaginary game where Caltech beat MIT. During the 1961 Rose Bowl Game, Caltech students altered the flip-cards that were raised by the stadium attendees to display “Caltech.” This event is now referred to as the Great Rose Bowl Hoax.
Recently, a group of Caltech students pulled a string of pranks during MIT’s Campus Preview Weekend for admitted students. These include covering up the word Massachusetts in the “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” engraving on the main building façade with a banner so that it read “That Other Institute of Technology”. A group of MIT hackers responded by altering the banner so that the inscription read “The Only Institute of Technology.” Caltech students also passed out T-shirts to MIT’s incoming freshman class, with MIT on the front and “… because not everyone can go to Caltech” along with an image of a palm tree on the back.

Notable Alumni
On television, several characters from the sitcoms The Big Bang Theory and Joey are associated with Caltech

Carl D. Anderson – Nobel laureate in physics (1936) for proving the existence of positrons
Chung-Yao Chao – first scientist to capture positrons through electron-positron annihilation; father of atomic energy enterprise of China
William A. Fowler – Nobel laureate in physics (1983) for his studies of the nuclear reactions in stars
Donald A. Glaser – Nobel laureate in physics (1960) for the invention of the bubble chamber
Arnold Beckman – Inventor of the pH meter, founder of Beckman Instruments and financier of the first “silicon” company in Silicon Valley, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
Leland H. Hartwell – Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine (2001)
Robert Dilworth – mathematician, famous for Dilworth’s theorem
Michael Aschbacher – winner of the Cole Prize in Algebra (1980)
Fernando J. Corbató – Computer scientist, recipient of the 1990 Turing Award
Donald Knuth – Computer scientist, creator of TeX typesetting language, and author of The Art of Computer Programming, recipient of the 1974 Turing Award
Tsutomu Shimomura – Computational physicist and computer security expert, tracked down and helped the FBI arrest hacker Kevin Mitnick
Charles Francis Richter – seismologist, creator of the Richter scale
Harrison Schmitt – astronaut and US Senator, the only geologist to have ever walked on the moon
Sabeer Bhatia – Co-founder of Hotmail
Chester Carlson – Inventor of the photocopier, the foundation of Xerox
Cleve Moler – Inventor of MATLAB, co-founder of The MathWorks, influential in the field of numerical analysis
Gordon E. Moore – co-founder of Intel Corp. and author of Moore’s law
Benjamin Rosen – co-founder of Compaq, founding partner Sevin Rosen Funds, brother of Harold Rosen (MS 1948, PhD 1951).

4. University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is considered to be the fourth best university among the top 10 universities in the world – 2008. The University of Oxford, located in the City of Oxford, Oxfordshire, Great Britain, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world, and can lay claim to nine centuries of continuous existence.. It is also regarded as one of the world’s leading academic institutions. The name is sometimes abbreviated as Oxon. in post-nominals (from the Latin Oxoniensis), although Oxf is sometimes used in official publications. The University has 38 independent colleges, and 6 permanent private halls. Oxford Entrepreneurs is the largest student entrepreneur society in the UK, with over 1,200 members, one in ten of whom are running their own companies.

Notable Alumni
There are many famous Oxonians (as alumni of the University are known)
Twenty-five British prime ministers have attended Oxford (including William Gladstone, Herbert Asquith, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair).
Actors Hugh Grant, Kate Beckinsale, Dudley Moore, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones were undergraduates at the University, as were Oscar-winner Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and film-maker Ken Loach. Sportspeople who have attended the university include Imran Khan.
Some contemporary scientists include Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Nobel prize-winner Anthony James Leggett, and Tim Berners-Lee, co-inventor of the World Wide Web.

3. University of Cambridge

Standing third in the list of top 10 universities in the world – 2008 is the University of Cambridge. The University of Cambridge, located in Cambridge, England, is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world.The University grew out of an association of scholars in the city of Cambridge that was formed, early records suggest, in 1209 by scholars leaving Oxford after a dispute with local townsfolk there. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are often jointly referred to as “Oxbridge.” In addition to cultural and practical associations as a historic part of English society, the two universities also have a long history of rivalry with each other. It has produced 83 Nobel Laureates to date, more than any other university in the world according to some counts.

Notable Alumni
Cambridge University has educated 15 British Prime Ministers, including Robert Walpole (First Prime Minister of Great Britain). At least twenty-three Heads of State or Heads of Government have attended Cambridge University, including three Prime Ministers of India, two Prime Ministers of Singapore, Stanley Bruce (Prime Minister of Australia), Tunku Abdul Rahman (first Prime Minister of Malaysia) and Margrethe II of Denmark (Queen Regnant of Denmark).

2. Yale University

Yale University stands second in the list of top 10 universities in the world – 2008. Yale University is a private university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is a member of the Ivy League.Yale and Harvard have been rivals in almost everything for most of their history, notably academics, rowing, and American football. In sports, The Game and the Harvard-Yale Regatta are annual contests.

Notable Alumni
All U.S. presidents between 1989 and 2009 were Yale graduates, namely George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton (who attended Yale Law School along with his wife, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton), and George W. Bush. Vice President Dick Cheney attended Yale, although he did not graduate.
Other notable alumni are:
Francis S. Collins (Ph.D.), director, Human Genome Project.
Eric Fossum (Ph.D. 1984), inventor of CMOS image sensor.
Grace Hopper (M.A. 1930, Ph.D. 1934), inventor of COBOL programming language.
Jordan Mechner (B.A. 1985), videogame developer, created Prince of Persia.
Samuel F. B. Morse (1810), telegraph pioneer, inventor of Morse code.
Harry Nyquist (Ph.D. 1917), engineer known for the Nyquist theorem.
Ronald Rivest (B.S. 1969), computer scientist, the “R” in the RSA cryptography, 2002 Turing Award recipient.
Roland W. Betts, investor, film producer (Gandhi), owner of Chelsea Piers, lead owner in George W. Bush’s Texas Rangers partnership
Rob Glaser (B.A., M.A.), founder & CEO, RealNetworks
Bing Gordon, co-founder, executive vice-president, and chief creative officer of Electronic Arts
Roberto Goizueta (B.E. 1953), former CEO, Coca-Cola
Briton Hadden (B.A. 1920), co-founder of Time magazine
W. James McNerney (B.A. 1971), CEO of The Boeing Company
Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi (M.P.P.M. Yale School of Management 1980), CEO and President, Pepsi .

1. Harvard University

Occupying the top position for more than 5 years among the top 10 universities in the world, Harvard University continues to stand first in the list. Harvard University, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. and a member of the Ivy League is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard University is made up of ten separate schools.The name Harvard comes from the college’s first benefactor, the young minister John Harvard of Charlestown. Upon his death in 1638, he left half his estate to the institution established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Notable Alumni
Harvard has produced many famous alumni, along with a few infamous ones. Among the best-known are:
political leaders – John Hancock, John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Pierre Trudeau, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Michael Ignatieff; current UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon; former governor of Puerto Rico Anibal Acevedo Vila;
philosopher – Henry David Thoreau
author – Ralph Waldo Emerson;
poets – Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings; composer Leonard Bernstein; cellist Yo Yo Ma;
actors – Jack Lemmon, Natalie Portman, Matt Damon, Mira Sorvino, Elisabeth Shue, Rashida Jones and Tommy Lee Jones
film directors – Darren Aronofsky, Mira Nair and Terrence Malick
architect – Philip Johnson
Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello.

Huh! Quite Huge! I often dream of being a part of these universities (any of ‘em). So, that was the list of top 10 universities in the world – 2008.