University Rankings

Having lead a relatively academic life so far and being involved with lots of teaching people often ask me what the good universities are. It's hard to come up with something on the spot that you can really stand by.

Often people are considering traveling and living somewhere at great expense - you don't want this time, effort and money to go to waste. Luckily I have come up with a relatively fool-proof way of answering this question.

Any university with 20+ nobel prize laureates is probably quite decent. If your studying a nice solid established field then this should be the guide you use. If your in a new field (CS) then perhaps pay a bit of attention to the Academic Ranking of World Universities compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. This ranking I believe acts as a bit of a 'predictor' for future nobel-success, since the nobel prizes seem to lag a bit behind the times, regardless of their original intention.

Without further ado, here's the list:
University of Cambridge (4th Academic Ranking 2008 - SJTU)
University of Chicago (9th Academic Ranking 2008 - SJTU)
Columbia University (7th Academic Ranking 2008 - SJTU)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (5th Academic Ranking 2008 - SJTU)
University of Paris
University of Oxford (10th Academic Ranking 2008 - SJTU)
Stanford University (2nd Academic Ranking 2008 - SJTU)
University of California, Berkeley (3rd Academic Ranking 2008 - SJTU)
Georg August University of Göttingen
Harvard University (1st Academic Ranking 2008 - SJTU)
Cornell University
Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich
Yale University
New York University
Princeton University (8th Academic Ranking 2008 - SJTU)
Johns Hopkins University
California Institute of Technology (aka CALTECH) (6th Academic Ranking 2008 - SJTU)
ETH Zurich
University of Heidelberg
Humboldt University Berlin
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Manchester
Washington University in St. Louis
University of Zurich
University of Pennsylvania
Technical University of Munich
University of London
...
Noteable CS-strong sub-20's:

Carnegie Mellon University (17)
University of California, San Diego (17)
Uppsala University (15)
Imperial College London(14)
University of California, Los Angeles (10)
University of Texas at Austin (9) + Dallas (3)
University of Tokyo (9)
University of Vienna (9)
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (7)

Australian Universities:
University of Melbourne (6)
University of Adelaide (6)
The Australian National University (3)
University of Sydney (3)
University of Western Australia (2)

Of course, if your interested in a specific area, eg: GPGPU's you can look further down the list (eg: Georgia Institute of Technology (aka GATECH) (2)). CS is usually one of the more tricky ones since Maths/CS/etc don't get any nobel prizes. But that doesn't make Cambridge, MIT, and Stanford any less good...