London Times: C.U. #15

Cornell was ranked the 15th best university in the world last week when The London Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) released their new 2006 rankings. Cornell was ranked 14th last year.
This was the third year that THES has ranked the world’s top 200 universities; they included a book with their supplement called Top Universities Guide, which ranks the top 500 universities in the world.
The top 200 come from 30 different countries; the top 500 come from 51.
The rankings are based on a range of qualitative and quantitative criteria similar to the previous year’s methodology. The rankings included weighted scores for peer reviews (40 percent), recruiter reviews (10 percent), international faculty (5 percent), international students (five percent), faculty-to-student ratio (20 percent) and citations of academic papers to faculty ratio (20 percent).
THES partnered with QS Ltd. to gather data from 3,703 academics around the world for the peer reviews, according to the explanation of the rankings on their website. These academics were asked to name up to 30 universities they regard as the top institutions in their area (science, medicine, technology, social science or arts and humanities).
The recruiter reviews were gleamed from 736 professional recruiters in manufacturing, services, finance, transport and the public sector. THES asked the recruiters, most of whom work internationally or on a national scale in a large country, which universities they liked to recruit from.
The international faculty and student statistics were included to show how international a university is, according to THES. The academic citations ratio tries to examine the amount of intellectual power a university commands relative to its size.
The top 13 universities were all from the United States or Great Britain. Harvard was ranked number one, with Cambridge and Oxford ranked two and three, respectively.