The top spot is in sight, with only MIT outranking Cambridge.Treye Rice

The University of Cambridge has been ranked alongside Imperial College London in joint second place in the latest world university rankings.

The QS World University Rankings 2014 were published today, charting Cambridge’s further rise on the international academic stage. Cambridge improved on its third place position last year and now comes second only to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), after Harvard University made a dramatic fall from second to fourth.

Cambridge students will be pleased to see the University of Oxford languishing in joint fifth place with University College London, after Imperial College London jumped from fifth to second place in just one year. The success of Imperial College London in ‘leapfrogging’ Oxford to an equal standing with Cambridge has even led some to question the term ‘Oxbridge’, with the Independent suggesting ‘Impbridge’ would be a more suitable term for the two best universities in the UK.  

Graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were also rated as the most employable, although the ranking cements Cambridge’s position as the best performing British institution for total research citations, despite wealthier US universities such as Harvard and MIT regularly dominating this field.  

Cambridge enjoyed similar successes against its American Ivy League counterparts earlier this summer after holding onto fifth place in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) for the fourth year in a row. It also remained the only British institution to enter the top five.

A spokesman for the University was suitably celebratory: “This ranking, like all the others, reflects the fact that the University of Cambridge is among a small group of the most respected and influential higher education institutions in the world.”

The QS rankings are regarded alongside the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU, also known as the Shanghai Rankings) as one of the most influential and widely observed rankings of international universities.

It was also a good year on the whole for British institutions as a whole, with Oxbridge and London colleges making up half of the top ten alongside American universities. The top thirty also featured Kings College London, Edinburgh, Bristol and Manchester universities, whilst over 29 of the 200 higher education institutions were from the UK.