World rankings: Top 10 universities in 2014

Britain’s higher-education consulting firm Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) released its annual global ranking of universities for 2014. Here are the top 10 schools: 

#2 (tie): Imperial College London

Olivia Harris/Reuters/File
Biomedical PhD student Meghan Betts (L) and neurotechnology PhD student Andreas Thomik pose as they demonstrate a motion capture suit at the Strictly Science Exhibition at Imperial College in London.

Shaking off Oxford to become one of the UK’s top two universities, Imperial College’s dominance on the QS list rests on its slate of globally renowned science and engineering programs. Its name and motto — “knowledge is the adornment and protection of the Empire” — may be a bit outdated, but Imperial jumped three places on the rankings list this year, bringing it within reach of becoming the world’s top university, at least according to QS.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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