TOP 5 UNIVERSITIES

Harvard University located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the eight private Ivy League institutions. Founded in 1636 by the legislature of Massachusetts, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the country. It is also the first corporation (properly The President and Fellows of Harvard College) to be chartered in the USA.

The university was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard, a church minister. Initially the college trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy, although it was never formally affiliated with a church. Over time Harvard's curriculum and students grew more and more secular, and by the 19th century the institution was considered the leading cultural establishment among the Boston elite. Under the tenure (1869 – 1909) of university president Charles W. Eliot, after the American Civil War the college and affiliated professional schools turned into a centralized research university; in 1900 Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities. James Bryant Conant steered the university (1933 – 1953) through the Great Depression and the Second World War, reforming the curriculum and liberalizing the admissions system after the war. Upon its merger with Radcliffe College in 1977 Harvard became coeducational. In 2007, after 27 male presidents, Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the first female president of the university.

Harvard's financial endowment was valued at US$25.6 billion in September 2009, more than any other school. These assets, combined with the history and influence of Harvard, have made it one of the world's most prestigious universities.

Harvard has a teaching staff of over 2,000, and approximately 6,700 undergraduate and 13,600 graduate and professional students. Its graduates include eight US presidents, and 75 Nobel Laureates have links with the university either as former students or as staff. Sixty-two living billionaires attended Harvard, more than any other school in the USA. The Harvard University Library is the largest academic library and the second largest library in the USA.

The university is spread out over campuses throughout the Boston metropolitan area, in ten separate academic institutions. The main campus (0,85 km²/210 acres) is about 5.5 km (3.4 mi) northwest of downtown Boston and surrounds Harvard Yard in Cambridge. The Business School, Harvard Stadium, and most athletics facilities are in Allston, on the other side of the Charles River; and the schools for medical, dental, and public health studies are situated in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area.

The Leland Stanford Junior University (commonly Stanford University or Stanford) is a private research university located in Stanford, California. The university concentrates on scientific, technological, and social science research. The campus (33 km²/8,180 acres) is located in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley about 32 km (20 mi) northwest of San Jose and 60 km (37 mi) southeast of San Francisco.

The university was founded as a coeducational and non-denominational institution in 1891 by Leland Stanford, a Californian railroad tycoon and politician, to commemorate his son, Leland Stanford Jr, dead of typhoid at the age of 16. After Stanford's death in 1893 the university encountered financial difficulty, which was compounded when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake caused extensive damage to the campus. In 1919 Herbert C Hoover, one of the first graduates of Stanford and future US president (1929 – 1933), set up the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at the university to archive historical records, starting with copious amounts of material on the First World War. Following World War II, Frederick Terman, the head of the university (1955 – 1965), encouraged graduates and faculty members to establish and promote self-sufficient local businesses in what would later be known as Silicon Valley. Twenty-five years after the end of World War II, Stanford would harbor fundamental science research; the longest linear accelerator in the world; and one of the first four ARPANET nodes, the nucleus of the internet. Cisco Systems, Electronic Arts, Google, Hewlett-Packard, LinkedIn, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo! were all founded by Stanford faculty or alumni. In 2010 Stanford administered research funding of US$1.15 billion and endowment support of US$15.9 billion.

Stanford is divided into seven schools: two academic schools, Humanities and Sciences, and Earth Sciences; and five professional schools, Business, Education, Engineering, Law, and Medicine. There are approximately 6,900 undergraduate and 8,400 graduate students. The institution is among the founding members of the Association of American Universities. Its teams participate in 34 varsity sports, and it is one of the only two private universities to compete in the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Pacific-10 Conference.

The University of Cambridge (commonly Cambridge University or simply Cambridge) is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The second oldest university in both England and the English-speaking world, it is the world's seventh oldest university.

Records indicate the university dates back to an association formed in 1209 of scholars previously from Oxford who had left that city after a dispute with townsfolk. The two so-called "ancient universities," often jointly referred to as Oxbridge, are similar in many ways. Both are historic parts of British society as well as being rivals of long standing.

The University numbers more Nobel Prize winners among its teaching body or students than any other institute of learning, with 88 Nobel Laureates to date; most recently Robert G Edwards, awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. A member of the Russell Group of research-led British universities, the Coimbra Group, the League of European Research Universities, and the International Alliance of Research Universities, the university constitutes part of the "Golden Triangle" of British universities with Oxford and London.

The University of California, Berkeley (commonly referred to as Cal-Berkeley, California, Berkeley, UC Berkeley, or just plain Cal) is a public research university in Berkeley, California. It was founded in 1868 when the private College of California merged with the public Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College, and is the oldest major campus of the ten that are affiliated with the University of California. The central campus occupies about 0.8 km² (200 acres) in the San Francisco Bay Area while the university overall occupies 26.92 km² (6,651 acres).

The university is among the founders of the Association of American Universities. The scientific director of the Manhattan Project was a physicist from Berkeley: J Robert Oppenheimer, who personally established the project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II. Since then Berkeley has managed or co-managed the Los Alamos National Laboratory and, for the US Department of Energy, the Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories.

Around 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs are offered, covering a wide range of disciplines. University faculty, alumni, or researchers have won 66 Nobel Prizes, 9 Wolf Prizes, 7 Fields Medals, 12 Turing Awards, 43 MacArthur Fellowships, 19 Academy Awards, and 11 Pulitzer Prizes, among other distinctions. The university is a member of the Pacific-10 Conference as well as the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in the NCAA. Student athletes participate in intercollegiate competitions as the California Golden Bears, and Cal students have won national titles in many sports, such as football, baseball, crew, rugby, softball, and water polo, and men's basketball and gymnastics. They have won over 100 Olympic medals. Yale Blue and California Gold are the official colors of the university and its athletic teams.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research institute situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT includes five schools and one college, with a total of 32 academic departments. The main focus is on scientific and technological research.

The institute was founded by William Barton Rogers in 1861 to meet the demands of increasing industrialization in the USA. It was quick to introduce the European polytechnic university model and concentrate on laboratory instruction. The present campus opened in 1916. It occupies 0.68 km² (168 acres) and stretches along the northern bank of the Charles River basin for over 1.6 km (one mile). In 1934 MIT was elected to the Association of American Universities. During the Second World War and the Cold War, its researchers strove to develop computers, radar, and inertial guidance for defense research. Educational disciplines at MIT have grown beyond physical sciences and engineering since the 1950s to include, e.g., biology, economics, linguistics, management, and political science.

MIT has about 1,000 faculty members. Approximately 4,230 undergraduates and 6,150 graduate students were enrolled for 2009 – 2010. Affiliates of the institute include 76 Nobel Laureates, 50 National Medal of Science recipients, and 35 MacArthur Fellows. MIT is characterized by a strong tradition of entrepreneurship, and the aggregated revenues of the companies founded by MIT alumni would constitute the world's seventeenth largest economy. In 2009, MIT administered research expenditures of US$718.2 million and a financial endowment worth US$8.0 billion.

The institute's sports teams are called the Engineers. MIT sponsors 33 sports and competes in NCAA Division III, the New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference, and the New England Football Conference; and for crew in the NCAA Division I, EARC, and EAWRC.