By Jordan Schraeder in Promote & Protect, Special on |

The University of Texas motto isn’t ‘what starts here changes Texas,’ or even ‘what starts here changes the nation.’ Our commercials boast that what starts at UT truly changes the world–which is why being ranked the 35th best university in the world comes as no surprise.

The Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University released its ninth annual Academic Ranking of World Universities report earlier this month.

UT tied with Duke University in the 35th spot this year, moving up three slots from 38th in 2010. Other notable rankings: the computer science program landed in eighth place globally, while the engineering department took sixth.

The list, which features the top 500 universities throughout the globe, is largely monopolized by American schools. With Harvard, Stanford, and MIT rounding out the top three, the United States is home to 53 of the top 100 universities and 151 of the entire list, the most of any country.

The colleges were ranked by six criteria gathered mostly from third-party institutions, in hopes of obtaining objective data.

These criteria included:

the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals

the number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific

the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science

the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index

per capita performance with respect to the size of an institution

To see the full list of ranked world universities, click here.