The top three spots on the QS World University Rankings changed this year, with MIT taking the top spot for 2012. MIT overtook the University of Cambridge, which took second place ahead of Harvard, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

British schools took four of the top six spots, but American colleges and universities occupy 13 of the top 20 spots in the annual ranking.

This ranking is based on reputation among academics, reputation among employers, citations per faculty, staff-to-student ratios and international attractiveness.

Check out the entire list:

1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) United States 2 University of Cambridge United Kingdom 3 Harvard University United States 4 UCL (University College London) United Kingdom 5 University of Oxford United Kingdom 6 Imperial College London United Kingdom 7 Yale University United States 8 University of Chicago United States 9 Princeton University United States 10 California Institute of Technology (Caltech) United States 11 Columbia University United States 12 University of Pennsylvania United States 13 ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Switzerland 14 Cornell University United States 15 Stanford University United States 16 Johns Hopkins University United States 17 University of Michigan United States 18 McGill University Canada 19 University of Toronto Canada 20 Duke University United States 21 University of Edinburgh United Kingdom 22 University of California, Berkeley (UCB) United States 23 University of Hong Kong Hong Kong 24 Australian National University Australia 25 National University of Singapore (NUS) Singapore 26 King's College London (University of London) United Kingdom 27 Northwestern University United States 28 University of Bristol United Kingdom 29 Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Switzerland 30 The University of Tokyo Japan 31 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) United States 32 The University of Manchester United Kingdom 33 The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Hong Kong 34 École Normale Supérieure, Paris France 35 Kyoto University Japan 36 The University of Melbourne Australia 37 Seoul National University Korea, South 38 University of Wisconsin-Madison United States 39 The University of Sydney Australia 40 The Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong 41 Ecole Polytechnique France 42 Brown University United States 43 New York University (NYU) United States 44 Peking University China 45 University of British Columbia Canada 46 The University of Queensland Australia 47 Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore 48 Tsinghua University China 49 Carnegie Mellon University United States 50 Osaka University Japan 51 University of Copenhagen Denmark 52 The University of New South Wales Australia 53 Technische Universität München Germany 54 University of Glasgow United Kingdom 55 Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Germany 56 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign United States 57 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill United States 58 The University of Warwick United Kingdom 59 University of Washington United States 60 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Germany 61 Monash University Australia 62 University of Amsterdam Netherlands 63 KAIST - Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology Korea, South 64 Boston University United States 65 Tokyo Institute of Technology Japan 66 The University of Sheffield United Kingdom 67 Trinity College Dublin Ireland 68 University of Texas at Austin United States 69 London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) United Kingdom 70 University of California, San Diego (UCSD) United States 71 Lund University Sweden 72 The University of Nottingham United Kingdom 73 University of Southampton United Kingdom 74 University of Geneva Switzerland 75 Leiden University Netherlands 75 Tohoku University Japan 77 University of Birmingham United Kingdom 78 University of Helsinki Finland 79 The University of Western Australia Australia 80 National Taiwan University (NTU) Taiwan 81 Uppsala University Sweden 82 KU Leuven Belgium 83 The University of Auckland New Zealand 84 Washington University in St. Louis United States 85 Utrecht University Netherlands 86 Nagoya University Japan 87 Freie Universität Berlin Germany 88 Georgia Institute of Technology United States 89 Aarhus University Denmark 90 Fudan University China 90 University of Zurich Switzerland 92 Durham University United Kingdom 93 University of St Andrews United Kingdom 94 University of Leeds United Kingdom 95 City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong 95 Purdue University United States 97 Pohang University of Science And Technology (POSTECH) Korea, South 98 University of Pittsburgh United States 99 Erasmus University Rotterdam Netherlands 100 University of California, Davis United States

Based on those criteria its not surprising that MIT won.