UK and US universities dominate the Top Ten list of the World University Rankings 2016-2017.

The report by London-based weekly magazine Times Higher Education revealed that for the first time in 12 years a UK university, namely the University of Oxford, topped the list.

Second place in the latest ranking is held by five-time leader California Institute of Technology, followed by Stanford University, the University of Cambridge and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which all retained their positions from last year in third, fourth and fifth place, respectively.

In addition to a better performance across the report's four main criteria (teaching, research, citations and international outlook), Oxford is said to achieve the success due to its total income, influential research and its ability to draw international talent.

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Meanwhile, 289 Asian universities from 24 countries are recognized in the overall list of 980 institutions. Among the top 50 are the National University of Singapore, ranked 24th, China's Peking University (29) and Tsinghua University (35), the University of Tokyo (39), the University of Hong Kong (43), and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (49). As for Indonesian universities, only the Bandung Institute of Technology and the University of Indonesia were acknowledged, both sitting below position 800.

In a press release, Rajika Bhandari, deputy vice-president of research and evaluation at the Institute of International Education, said many Asian scholars who had gone to study at Western universities and come back to their home countries as academics had “really begun to transform their own higher education sectors and brought back some of the teaching values of critical thinking and liberal education, as well as the idea of promotion based on merit and research outputs."

But Richard Robison, emeritus professor at the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, said higher education institutions in Asian countries tended to create a “very pressured environment”, have “a lot of learning by rote” and lacked “discussion in classes”. “I can’t see them becoming the giant intellectual hubs that some big Western universities have become over a couple of hundred years, because they have a different idea about education and a different way of going about it," he added. (kes)

Top 10 World University Rankings 2016-2017
1. University of Oxford, UK
2. California Institute of Technology, US
3. Stanford University, US
4. University of Cambridge, UK
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US
6. Harvard University, US
7. Princeton University, US
8. Imperial College London, UK
9. ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland
10. University of California, Berkeley, US
10. University of Chicago, US