The 20 Best Universities In The World

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has retained its top spot in the QS World Universities ranking, which the education networking company says is the world's most widely read university comparison.

This is the third consecutive year QS has rated MIT number one. The QS World Universities ranking assesses more than 3,000 schools on six criteria - academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty/student ratio, citations per faculty, international student ratio, and international staff ratio.

Here are QS' top 20 universities in the world:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. University of Cambridge
2. Imperial College London
4. Harvard University
5. University of Oxford
5. University College London
7. Stanford University
8. California Institute of Technology
9. Princeton University
10. Yale University
11. University of Chicago
12. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
13. University of Pennsylvania
14. Columbia University
14. Johns Hopkins University
16. King's College London
17. University of Edinburgh
17. Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
19. Cornell University
20. University of Toronto

And a closer look at how the top 10 changed between 2013 and 2014:

The list is dominated by universities in the US and UK, with many schools that emphasize STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) rising in this year's ranking.

On Business Insider's new ranking of the best colleges in America, tech-focused schools also dominated. We asked professionals with hiring experience to rate how well schools prepared students for success after graduation, and Stanford took the top spot, followed by MIT and Caltech.

Check out the full QS World Universities ranking here >>