The University of Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world and feeder for the British elite, has topped a global education ranking for the first time, but its vice-chancellor warned that Brexit could damage its long-term prospects.
The University of Oxford has become the first UK university to top the Times Higher Education World University Rankings in the 12-year history of the table.
Oxford knocked the leader for the last five years, California Institute of Technology, into second place in the Times Higher Education's global league table, which also saw Chinese universities climb rapidly.
Reuters reports that Oxford, which educated four of the last six British prime ministers, ousted its U.S. rival after its research funding rose 10 percent and overall funding rose to 1.4 billion pounds ($1.83 billion), while the impact of its research increased, said Phil Baty, editor of the rankings.
But Baty said Britain's exit from the European Union "is a serious risk to our success" by making it harder to attract top academic staff and plug them into research projects.
While Oxford, the University of Cambridge and London's Imperial College make the top 10 along with ETH Zurich, the list is dominated by U.S. universities.
Stanford University is ranked third, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology fifth, Harvard sixth, Princeton seventh and the University of California, Berkeley and University of Chicago at tenth equal.
Cambridge was ranked fourth, Imperial eighth and ETH Zurich ninth.
More broadly, the rankings showed institutions in Asia had made progress with two new Asian universities – the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology – now in the 100 and another four joining the top 200.
Peking University rose to 29th place from 42, and Tsinghua ranked 35, up from 47th last year.
Asian universities were "powering up the rankings," Baty said, with the Chinese government pumping billions of dollars into its universities at the same time that austerity in the west was squeezing budgets.
Overall, 289 Asian universities from 24 countries make the overall list of 980 institutions and an elite group of 19 are in the top 200, up from 15 last year.
