World's top universities

Here are the results of a study carried out at Shanghai Jiao Tong University on the world's top universities. The criteria used for the study may be found here, and the list of the top 500 universities can be accessed from here. The top five are: Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Berkeley, and MIT. Manchester is at 78.

I'm not in any position to assess the soundness of the methodology used, but the results are interesting. If you look at the statistics by region and country, you can find some stark global and regional disparities. (Hat tip: SdeW.)