Ranking Of The World's Best Universities Shows America's Lead Is Slipping

The U.S. is down to just 63 out of the top 200.

A woman studies on the campus of Stanford University.

A new ranking of the world's best universities released Wednesday shows the United States' traditional lead is slipping.

The Times Higher Education's annual ranking of the top 200 universities worldwide includes 63 American institutions, down from 74 the year before. The U.S. still has 14 of the top 20 schools, however.

Times Higher Education, a London-based magazine, credited America's slip to a "surge of innovative European and Chinese schools." This year's rankings are the most inclusive, looking at 800 institutions, and refined aspects of their methodology, explained on their website.

A man walks on the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) campus in Pasadena, California, U.S.

California Institute of Technology, or CalTech, was named the No. 1 school in the world, for the second year in a row. The United Kingdom's biggest rivalry was won by the University of Oxford this year, as it beat the University of Cambridge, at No.s 2 and 4 respectively.

Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University follow up at third, fifth and sixth places. The University of California, Berkeley, at No. 13, is ranked the best public university from the U.S.

The rankings are based on a mix of teaching ratings, research, international outlook and citations by faculty.

The top 25 universities in the world in 2015-16, according to Times Higher Education:

Rank 2015-16	Institution	Country
1	California Institute of Technology	US
2	University of Oxford	UK
3	Stanford University	US
4	University of Cambridge	UK
5	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	US
6	Harvard University	US
7	Princeton University	US
8	Imperial College London	UK
9	ETH Zürich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich	Switzerland
10	University of Chicago	US
11	Johns Hopkins University	US
12	Yale University	US
13	University of California, Berkeley	US
14	University College London	UK
15	Columbia University	US
16	University of California, Los Angeles	US
17	University of Pennsylvania	US
18	Cornell University	US
19	University of Toronto	Canada
20	Duke University	US
21	University of Michigan	US
22	Carnegie Mellon University	US
23	London School of Economics and Political Science	UK
24	University of Edinburgh	UK
25	Northwestern University	US

The top 25 universities in the world in 2015-16, according to Times Higher Education:

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