The University of Toronto is the 20th-best school in the world, says a British mag

Times Higher Education, a British trade publication, has just released its world university rankings for 2014, and the University of Toronto has managed to crack the top 20. In fact, U of T is number 20, making it the only Canadian university to earn anything approaching top billing. (The next highest is the University of British Columbia, at number 32.) Not that methodology necessarily matters in the semi-arbitrary world of university rankings, but THE’s list was based on five sets of criteria, including teaching quality, research volume and research influence.

Who’d we beat? 380 other schools from around the world, including really good ones like Brown (number 50), Northwestern (21) and Carnegie Mellon (24).

Who beat us? Pretty much all the places you’d probably expect: Harvard (2), Oxford (3), Stanford (4) and so on. The University of Michigan’s high placement, at number 17, is a little more surprising. The number-one school is Caltech.