UC Berkeley ranked world’s No. 1 public, No. 4 overall, by U.S. News

UC Berkeley retains the title of the world’s No.1 public, and fourth-best university overall, in U.S. News & World Report’s latest global rankings.

As they did last year, Harvard, MIT and Stanford took the top three spots, with the UK’s University of Oxford right behind Berkeley to round out the top five.

The California Institute of Technology held on to sixth place, with the University of Cambridge, Columbia, Princeton and the University of Washington in Seattle finishing out the top 10.  Yale and Johns Hopkins dropped from the previous year to 11th and 12th.

As for the top five public universities, UC Berkeley ranked first globally, followed by the University of Washington, UCLA, UCSF and UC San Diego.

The U.S. News & World Report’s fifth annual Best Global University Rankings, made public today, focus on the publication of academic research and on reputation. This year, 1,250 universities in 75 countries were evaluated.

Across 22 subject ratings, UC Berkeley ranked first in chemistry and in environment/ecology; third in physics and in space science; fourth in economics and business, biology and biochemistry and plant and animal science; fifth in mathematics; and seventh in engineering and in arts and humanities.

Among other things, the U.S. News global rankings measure a university’s international and regional reputation and its performance in academic research, using such indicators as citations and publications. This year, Berkeley placed fifth for its global research standing and fourth for regional research reputation.

In addition to the United States, most of the institutions evaluated for the U.S. News global rankings were in China, the United Kingdom, Japan and Germany. Overall, U.S. universities performed well in computer science, economics and business, engineering and neuroscience and behavior