US universities ruled the top 10 spots in a global ranking conducted by a Chinese research centre with Harvard taking the crown for the 13th year, while French establishments bottomed out, reports FRANCE 24.
The top 10 universities were virtually unchanged from last year’s rankings with Stanford and MIT again coming in second and third, according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities released by a centre under Shanghai Jiaotong University.
The University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology remained in the same places - ranking fourth, sixth and seventh respectively.
Columbia University and University of Chicago came in at eighth and ninth.
University of Cambridge and University of Oxford, the only two non-American universities in the top 10, were fifth and 10th.
French establishments barely got a look-in with just three institutions in the top 100.
The capital’s Pierre and Marie Curie University came in at 36, University of Paris-Sud at 41, Ecole Normale Supérieure - Paris at 72 and the University of Strasbourg at 87.
France, however, did better when it came to rankings in mathematics, coming fifth.
Education Minister Thierry Mandon criticised the ShanghaiJiaotong University ranking system overall of being “unsuited to the French university model”.
Aiming for a higher rank in the future “must not become the alpha and omega of our educational policy”, he warned.
The Center of World-Class Universities under Jiaotong University surveys 1,200 universities and picks the top 500 every year.
Though the Chinese organiser claims the ranking to be "the most trustworthy", European officials have in the past criticised it for being biased against Europe's universities as it underemphasises the humanities and stresses sciences.
The organiser, which initially intended to benchmark the performance of Chinese universities, said the result was based on transparent methodology and third-party data.
It said the result was calculated based on several parameters, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals.