World's Top 500 Universities

See how your alma mater stacks up.

Or, consider this list before you matriculate.

Or, wonder why, if your school's so good, it seems so crummy.

Yeah, I'm talking to you, sitting there in the Brown University library and wondering how it all came to this.

In any event, the ratings are most interesting, a refreshing change from the annual U.S. News & World Report college ratings.

I like seeing the bigger picture.

Shanghai University's been compiling this list annually for the past few years.

They use a composite index of Nobel prizes, citations, and measures such as articles published in Science and Nature and other flagship journals.

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The Top 10:

1) Harvard

2) Stanford

3) Cambridge University

4) University of California-Berkeley

5) MIT

6) Cal Tech

7) Princeton

8) Oxford

9) Columbia

10) University of Chicago
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Alas, my alma mater,

UCLA [Go Bruins!], isn't even second among the University of California's many campuses, as it was for so many years; the University of California-San Diego is now ranked 13th in the world, ahead of my beloved 16th-ranked school.