In the 2010-2011 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, Oxford and Cambridge rank similarly to Harvard and Princeton.
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Not one Italian institution is in the top 100 of the 2008 Times Higher Education world university rankings.
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Britain's Times Higher Education magazine puts Peking University 50th and only six Chinese institutions in the top 200.
Earlier this week, Times Higher Education ran a big story on the apparent decline in the relative economic returns to university education.
It was compiled jointly by the Times Higher Education Supplement, a British periodical, and Quacquarelli Symonds, a provider of guides to higher education.
This week USP won another plaudit, becoming the only Latin American university to make it into the world's top 200 universities in another much-watched list, published by Times Higher Education, a British specialist weekly.
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings employ 13 separate performance indicators, which it says makes it the only world rankings to examine all the core missions of the modern global university - research, teaching, knowledge transfer and international activity.
The California Institute of Technology, a private institution with just 2, 200 students, takes the number one slot again this year on the ninth annual list of World University Rankings, put out by Times Higher Education, a London magazine that tracks the higher education market.
All of these statistics figured rather prominently in the Times Higher Education story, but perhaps the most interesting statistic is one which was buried half-way down, namely that the share of those with degree qualifications in high skilled occupations actually fell between 1993 and 2010.
In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.
Believe it or not, the Higher Education Act expired in September 2003 and has since been extended nine times.
Universities UK, which represents all UK universities, said it was difficult to compare international education systems - but other more established compilers of world rankings such as Times Higher, QS and Shanghai Jiaotong consistently rated the UK as second behind the United States.
Patrick Callan of the National Centre for Public Policy and Higher Education points out that state universities experience extremes of the economic cycle pampered in good times, spurned when budgets turn red.
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