The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2015-2016 list the best global universities and are the only international university performance tables to judge world class universities across all of their core missions - teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

The top universities rankings employ 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available, which are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments. This year's ranking includes 800 universities from 70 different countries, compared with the 400 universities from 41 countries in last year's table. View the World University Rankings methodology here.

This year's list of the best universities in the world features 147 of the top universities in the US – with 63 American universities making the top 200 of the list, including the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as the world’s number one university, followed by Stanford University in third place, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in fifth and Harvard University in sixth. But the US has been losing its dominance of the tables, as institutions in Europe improve their performance, including those in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The UK is the second best represented country in the rankings, with 78 universities in the top 800, and 34 in the top 200. The UK’s Oxford University is ranked second in the world, with Cambridge University in fourth. This year's ranking also marks the first time a university outside the US and the UK has made the top 10 for a decade. Discover more World University Rankings highlights here. Asia has seen a varied performance, with good news for Singapore, which now claims the top institution in the continent with National University of Singapore (NUS) in 26th place. China has two top fifty universities (Peking University and Tsinghua University) while Japan and South Korea have suffered declining performance.

Our list of the best global universities rankings include many performance indicators directly relevant to students and their families, to help them chose where to study, including faculty-student ratios, the university’s global reputation, its total resources, the international mix on campus, and its links to business. But a reason why the rankings are so widely respected is that they cover the full range of a university’s missions, including research excellence.