September 10, 2017
The University of Pennsylvania's Ivy League clout extends far beyond the United States in the latest annual rankings from the Times Higher Education, which slotted the West Philadelphia school among the top ten universities in the world.
Tied for tenth with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Penn's latest distinction comes after Forbes ranked the university seventh on its list of America's Best Colleges. Among Ivy League schools, Penn came in third behind Harvard University (sixth) and Princeton University (seventh).
England's University of Oxford and University of Cambridge took the top two spots.
The World University Rankings are the only global university performance table to judge research-intensive universities across all of their core missions, according to the Times Higher Education, whose calculations were submitted to an independent audit by professional services firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
Rankings were determined according to 13 performance indicators, with a focus on the quality and influence of teaching, research, citations, international outlook and industry income.
Among other area universities, only Penn State (77) and Pitt (100) made it into the top 100 schools. Temple University and Drexel University both landed in the range of 350-400 on a list that numbered 1,000 in total.
From a broader view, American universities were dominant but in many cases saw a drop in their overall rank. Two-fifths of the U.S. colleges in the world's top 200 —29 out of 62 — fell in rank.
The Netherlands, Germany and the U.K. were the three most represented countries on the 2018 list, but a major trend to emerge in this year's rankings was the rise of Chinese universities, most of which have improved their rank on a year-to-year basis following bigger investments in the country's educational institutions.
