We have now published six editions of the THE – QS World University Rankings, and they all agree on one thing: Harvard is the world’s top university. It exists within a uniquely strong university system - 54 US institutions appear in the top 200 .

Anyone looking closely at our tables over time will see that UK universities also feature strongly in our results, never more so than in 2009. This year, Cambridge appears second only to Harvard - four UK universities appear in the top six. Overall, there are 29 UK universities in the top 200.

At presentations on the World University Rankings around the globe, we are often asked why UK universities feature so strongly. The first point is that UK success in the rankings has nothing to do with the fact they are compiled by QS, a company based in London. QS is a global organization, with offices in major centres such as Paris, Stuttgart and Singapore, and gathers the data for these rankings worldwide.

Nor do we rely excessively on UK opinion in our academic and employer review. Only about 10% of the participants in these surveys are based in the UK, and academic participants are not allowed to vote for their own institution.
 

In addition, we are not alone in finding excellence in UK universities. The institutions that feature strongly in our analysis show up well in other ranking systems such as Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT) from Taiwan and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. The difference is that they appear much more prominently in our system. We have Cambridge in second place, while Shanghai and HEEACT place the university fourth and 15th respectively.

UK universities do well in our rankings for several reasons. One is that they excel in a wide range of subjects, whereas these other systems mainly measure scientific research. Even Imperial College, despite its science-oriented mission, has a well-regarded business school and other social science departments.
 

But at its heart, the UK’s international success in higher education reflects deliberate government policy. While the UK has around 130 universities, the vast majority of the research funding they receive only goes to about a quarter of them. These are essentially the institutions we see in the rankings. The British government has recently announced that it intends to go on doing this, despite the objections of more modest institutions.

Despite acute reservations from within the more egalitarian education systems of continental Europe, the message is getting through to politicians that this approach works. This is why Germany launched the €1.9 billion Excellence Initiative under which research cash is being concentrated in nine universities. It is also why the European Commission set up the European Research Council in a bid to build a small number of globally-competitive research teams across the continent. The ERC is now announcing its first major awards.

In recent years the UK government has concentrated funding and increased the total amount it spends on research. The upshot is that of the five British institutions in our top 20, three - Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial -  have a perfect 100 in our academic peer review, which accounts for 40% of a university’s possible final score. The other two, University College London (UCL) and Edinburgh, score 98 and 97 respectively on this measure. Interestingly, this concentration of cash does not seem to produce highly cited research. The UK’s top institution in our count of citations per faculty member is UCL with 90 out of a possible 100, behind 36 other universities from around the world.

The other qualitative measure we use, employer opinion, shows the UK in an even more positive light. Here six UK universities score a perfect 100 and six more get 99, a massive endorsement by any standard.

The popularity of British universities with employers is especially helpful at a time when they are involved in a fierce marketing battle with other institutions both at home and abroad, not to mention when there is domestic political debate about university fees and the value of a degree. Their attractiveness to students from around the world is shown by our data on international student numbers. The London School of Economics is top in the world here and Imperial also scores 100, while UCL, Oxford and Cambridge score 99, 97 and 96 respectively.

A vital part of the student experience is having enough staff to teach the students, which we measure via the faculty/student ratio. This is one measure on which Europe generally outguns the US. Here again, four of the five UK universities in our top 20 have a perfect score and the staff of UK universities are likely to bring a global flavour to their teaching. LSE has a perfect score for international staff and the UK’s top general universities all score well into the 90s.
 

It is true that institutions lower down the rankings, can do well by being strong in one area and weak in others. Generally this tends to involve an emphasis on teaching rather than research. But the lesson of the UK presence at the top of this table is that the most competitive institutions compete across the board.

By Martin Ince, Founding Editor of the THE – QS World University Rankings