Oxford crowned the best in the Times' World University 2024 rankings. Where else made the grade?

The University of Oxford continues its supremacy at the top of the league table of the world's best university for an eighth year, according to the newly published 2024 Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings.

Other institutions from the anglosphere dominate the top 10, with familiar fixtures Harvard (4) and Cambridge (5) continuing to be represented at the top of the board.

The top five, however, have shifted slightly, with Stanford being elevated from joint third in 2023 to second in this year's rankings and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) rising from fifth place in 2023 to third.

This has come largely at the expense of Harvard slipping two places from second place in 2023, with Cambridge falling from joint third to the fifth spot.

More widely, there has been a noticeable decline in the fortunes of US and UK universities this year, as well as a further slide for European universities, while Asia's star continues to rise, particularly for higher education centres in China.

Tsinghua (12) and Peking (14) universities moved up the table, leapfrogging the likes of the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University.

To continue the trend of Asia's growing academic clout, Japan’s University of Tokyo now outperforms the University of Edinburgh, King’s College London, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, after rising 10 places to 29th position.

An analysis of six years of data by THE shows that the average rank of US universities has declined from 296 in the 2019 rankings to 348 in the latest edition; the UK’s average rank has also sank but to a lesser extent, from 451 to 477.

According to the overall scores in the THE rankings for 2024, European