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CAMBRIDGE and Oxford now rank among the top three universities in the world, second only to Harvard in the US, according to the latest global rankings published today.
Both British universities have moved up in the rankings for 2006, with Cambridge knocking the Massachusetts Institute of Technology off the No 2 position and Oxford advancing from fourth position to third. MIT is tied for fourth place with another US university, Yale.
The findings will bring cheer to Britain’s higher education sector at a time when some universities are giving warning that chronic underfunding of undergraduate teaching, poor cost recovery on research contracts, salary rises and increased administration costs are pushing their accounts into the red.
This week Oxford said that it was facing a “grave deficit” in its teaching accounts and that an increase in tuition fees was inevitable if standards were to be maintained.
Eric Thomas, Vice-Chancellor of Bristol University, said yesterday that the new £3,000 tuition fee limit was not enough to fund higher education and suggested it should rise to £5,000 a year.
Despite these concerns the university world rankings, produced by The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), confirm Britain’s position as a centre of global educational importance.
Harvard, whose endowment of $26 billion (£13.8 billion) exceeds total annual funding for all British universities, tops the table but its lead over its closest rival has fallen, from 13 per cent last year to just over 3 per cent over Cambridge this year.