Is the UK loosing it's grip in the Top 200 Universities in the world?

The position of UK universities in the 2008 Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings has deteriorated as the US elite cement their place at the top of the table.

The best-rated institution in the UK is the University of Cambridge, which fell one place to third, while the University of Oxford, which last year shared second place with Cambridge and Yale University, slipped to fourth.

For the fifth consecutive year Harvard University has topped the table, while Yale has broken away from its Oxbridge rivals to claim second place uncontested.

Among other leading UK institutions, Imperial College London fell from fifth to sixth place, while University College London, the last UK institution to make the top ten, rose from ninth to seventh place.

Of the top 100 institutions, 17 are from the UK, two fewer than in 2007 after the University of Leeds fell from 80th to 104th and Cardiff University from 99th to 133rd.

The UK's position across the top 200 also weakened, with the total number of institutions making the cut down from 30 to 29.

Of these, 22 slipped down the rankings, six improved their position and one, the University of Edinburgh, retained the same spot.

The shifting picture has raised questions about the strength of the sector and its funding.

Spending on higher education in the UK, as a proportion of gross domestic product, is below the average for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries and less than half that of the US.

By John Gill

Read more here: timeshighereducation.co.uk

Check out the Top 200 World Universities

Mae Jemison: A bold vision for teaching arts and sciences -- together

Mae Jemison is an astronaut, a doctor, an art collector, a dancer ... Telling stories from her own education and from her time in space, she calls on educators to teach both the arts and sciences, both intuition and logic, as one -- to create bold thinkers.

Mae Jemison is a poster child for an education that combines arts and sciences. As she says, "I always knew I'd go to space." Trained as an engineer, Jemison is a medical doctor, and she practiced in LA before becoming the Peace Corps' Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia. While running that effort, she researched Hepatitis B, schistosomaisis and rabies with the CDC and NIH.

Back in the US, she'd returned to her California practice when selected in 1987 for NASA's astronaut program. She was the science mission specialist on STS-47 Spacelab-J (September 12-20, 1992), a cooperative mission between the United States and Japan. From NASA's factsheet: "The eight-day mission was accomplished in 127 orbits of the Earth, and included 44 Japanese and U.S. life science and materials processing experiments. Dr. Jemison was a co-investigator on the bone cell research experiment flown on the mission. The Endeavour and her crew launched from and returned to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In completing her first space flight, Dr. Jemison logged 190 hours, 30 minutes, 23 seconds in space."

In 1994, Jemison founded the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, which runs an internationally-known science camp called The Earth We Share. She also founded BioSentient Corp. to explore bringing NASA biofeedback technology to public market. Jemison is also the first real astronaut to appear on Star Trek.