China’s best university is almost as good as Florida State

This item has been corrected.

The United States and United Kingdom are home to virtually all of the world’s top universities, and schools in Asia and continental Europe are barely worth a passing glance—at least in the eyes of an influential China ranking.

Harvard once again claimed the top spot in Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s list of the world’s top institutions of higher learning, followed by Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Caltech, Princeton, Columbia, University of Chicago and Oxford. No Asian universities and only one from continental Europe—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich—cracked the top 20.

The University of Tokyo and two other Japanese universities were the only Asian schools in the top 100. Only three institutions from mainland China rank in the top 200, as Shanghai’s Fudan University moved ahead of Peking University—in the absolute rankings, Fudan was sandwiched between the US universities Florida State and George Mason. Jiao Tong ranked itself third in mainland China, and #167 overall.

As Quartz has reported, by the end of this decade, three out of every 10 college students in the world will come from China. But the country hasn’t been able to build enough world-class educational facilities to meet domestic demand, prompting the country’s wealthy elite to send their progeny abroad for higher education.

The Jiao Tong rankings are calculated in part by measuring the number of Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners, the number of “highly cited” researchers, and the number of articles by faculty published in the magazines Nature and Science. Those measures tend to favor schools that are strong in math, science, and economics, and to work against schools that emphasize the humanities. The methodology also tends to make the rankings quite static: The top 10 barely shifted this time around, other than Berkeley and MIT changing places.

Here’s the top 50 (and the full list):

1. Harvard University

2. Stanford University

3. University of California, Berkeley

4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

5. University of Cambridge

6. California Institute of Technology

7. Princeton University

8. Columbia University

9. University of Chicago

10. University of Oxford

11. Yale University

12. University of California, Los Angeles

13. Cornell University

14. University of California, San Diego

15. University of Pennsylvania

16. University of Washington

17. The Johns Hopkins University

18. University of California, San Francisco

19. University of Wisconsin – Madison

20. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

21. The University of Tokyo

22. University College London

23. University of Michigan – Ann Arbor

24. The Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine

25. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

26. Kyoto University

27. New York University

28. University of Toronto

29. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

30. Northwestern University

31. Duke University

32. Washington University in St. Louis

33. University of Colorado at Boulder

34. Rockefeller University

35. University of California, Santa Barbara

36. The University of Texas at Austin

37. Pierre and Marie Curie University – Paris 6

38. University of Maryland, College Park

39. University of Paris Sud (Paris 11)

40. University of British Columbia

41. The University of Manchester

42. University of Copenhagen

43. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

44. Karolinska Institute

45. University of California, Irvine

46. The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas

47. University of California, Davis

47. University of Southern California

49. Vanderbilt University

50. Technical University Munich

Correction (August 15, 2013): There are three Asian universities ranked in the top 100 of Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s list. An earlier version of this article had reported that only one Asian school made the top 100.