Interesting how our K-12 school system is terrible and our colleges come out on top. Many Nobel prize winners are American or graduated from American colleges. It is generally because of the funding…the public school systems in the US are poor unlike the higher education (university) system, which is provided much research and funding, etc.

World Rankings-Top World Universities

Rank Institution Country

1 Harvard Univ USA

2 Stanford Univ USA

3 Univ Cambridge UK

4 Univ California – Berkeley USA

5 Massachusetts Inst Tech (MIT) USA

6 California Inst Tech USA

7 Princeton Univ USA

8 Univ Oxford UK

9 Columbia Univ USA

10 Univ Chicago USA

11 Yale Univ

12 Cornell Univ USA

13 Univ California – San Diego USA

14 Tokyo Univ Japan

15 Univ Pennsylvania USA

16 Univ California – Los Angeles USA

17 Univ California – San Francisco USA

18 Univ Wisconsin – Madison USA

19 Univ Michigan – Ann Arbor USA

20 Univ Washington – Seattle USA

1. Competition – the ranking is not set in stone and universities can improve, also students choose their universities instead of having one assigned to them.

2. American universities decided to go Germany one better. When US universities were set up German universities were the world’s best, but Americans recruited a bunch of German profs who were convinced they could improve on the already good German system.

3. Plentiful public and private funding.

4. Generous salary and benefits to attract the best profs.

5. An open system. Profs are recruited from anywhere in the world EXCEPT the university they graduated from. To recruit all your own students is called ‘academic incest’ and is grounds for losing accreditation. That keeps the ideas circulating, instead of having outdated ideas forever.

[The list could go on, but these are some of the reasons.]

visit http://guidetoonlinedegree.net/top-universities

-low student faculty ratio.

-small classrooms

-opportunity for research work

-liberal art education pecagogy

-continious accessment priority over one exam accessment

-empasis is on knowing how to think critically

-lots of freshman seminar

-generally more demanding e.g. lots of reading, writing and problem solving assignment.