Top Engineering Colleges in the World

The list of top engineering schools in the world is dominated by California. Three of the top five institutions across the world hail from the Golden State, home of the global high-tech hub Silicon Valley.

But the East Coast business powerhouse the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which boasts an $8 billion (£4.9 billion) endowment, remains an important player. It shares the top rank with last year's outright top dog, the California Institute of Technology.

The University of California, Berkeley stands at fourth rank while Stanford University, whose alumni include William Hewlett, David Packard and other electronics tycoons, takes fifth place. Four other members of the University of California - Los Angeles (eighth), Santa Barbara (joint 16th), San Diego (24th) and Davis (32nd) - are also among this highly coveted list. The results come despite the funding problem facing the State of California: only time will tell whether the institution can maintain its competitiveness.

In total, 22 US engineering schools feature in the top 50.

The United Kingdom also scores highly in the table, with three of the top 10 and five representatives overall.

But the field of engineering and technology, covering everything from aerospace engineering to sustainable energy research, software design and robotics, is one of the most diverse of the subject tables in terms of national representation.

It is also the subject in which Asia makes its strongest presence felt in any discipline.

It has 10 institutions in the top 50 (compared with only six from mainland Europe), headed by the National University of Singapore (19th).

Engineering is the largest of the university's 14 faculties and has grown from just 300 students in the late 1970s to more than 10,000 students presently.

The University of Tokyo, standing at 21st position, has won many large grants under the Japanese government's 21st Century Centre of Excellence Programme, set up in 2002 to reward world-class research and help maintain global competitiveness.

List of Top Engineering Institutes in the World
Name, Country, Score (out of hundred)

1. California Institute of Technology, United States, 92.7
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States, 92.7
3. Princeton University, United States, 92.4
4. University of California Berkeley, United States, 91.7
5. Stanford University, United States, 91.4
6. University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, 90.6
7. University of Oxford, United Kingdom, 87.4
8. University of California Los Angeles, United States, 87.3
9. ETH Zürich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich, Switzerland, 87.1
10. Imperial College London, United Kingdom, 85.7
11. Georgia Institute of Technology, United States, 85.4
12. Carnegie Mellon University, United States, 83.2
13. University of Texas at Austin, United States, 81
14. University of Michigan, United States, 80.8
15. Cornell University, United States, 79.8
16. University of California Santa Barbara, United States, 78.1
17. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, United States, 78.1
18. University of Toronto, Canada, 78
19. National University of Singapore, Singapore, 77.5
20. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, 77.1
21. University of Tokyo, Japan, 69.8
22. Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, 69.1
23. University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States, 69.1
24. University of California San Diego, United States, 67.8
25. University of Melbourne, Australia, 67.4
26. University of Manchester, United Kingdom, 67.1
27. University College London, United Kingdom, 66.6
28. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, 66.1
29. École Polytechnique, France, 65.9
30. University of Minnesota, United States, 65.9
31. Tsinghua University, China, 65.6
32. University of California Davis, United States, 65.2
33. University of British Columbia, Canada, 64.5
34. Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea, Republic Of, 63.8
35. The University of Sydney, Australia, 63.4
36. Pennsylvania State University, United States, 62.4
37. The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 62
38. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, 61.5
39. Purdue University, United States, 60.7
40. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, Republic Of, 60.2
41. Rice University, United States, 60.2
42. The Ohio State University, United States, 59.5
43. Technische Universität München, Germany, 58.7
44. Peking University, China, 58.5
45. Brown University, United States, 58.3
46. The University of Queensland Australia, Australia, 58.3
47. McGill University, Canada, 57.9
48. Kyoto University, Japan, 56.6
49. University of Waterloo, Canada, 56.6
50. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 55.3