Metro Universities Resource

The universities.org”target=”_self”title=”" >University of Tokyo is the best university in Asia according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The ARWU is published by the Institute of Higher Education at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and several indicators of academic or research performance are used to establish the ranking, these include highly cited researchers, articles indexed in major citation indices and staff winning Nobel Prizes. There are 80 Asian universities in the Word’s Top-500 universities (2008). The Top-5 universities in Asia are: 1. University of Tokyo (ranked 19th in the world); 2. Kyoto University (ranked 23rd); 3. Hebrew University Jerusalem (65th); 4. Osaka University (68th); and 5. Tohoku University (79th). Japan dominates the top rankings with four of the Top-5 Asian universities . The University of Tokyo (or ‘Todai’) was founded in 1877 as the first national university in Japan. It has been the best university in Asia in every year since 2003 according to the ARWU. The University of Tokyo has a total student body of about 29,000, evenly divided between undergraduate and graduate students. In 2006, there were 2,269 international students (roughly 8% of the student body). The University of Tokyo has a faculty of over 4,000. The University of Tokyo consists of nine faculties, a College of Arts and Sciences, 15 Graduate Schools and 11 Institutes. It has three campuses in Tokyo: Hongo (the main campus; 56 hectares), Komaba (35 hectares) and Kashiwa (24 hectares). Note: Despite this strong performance, Japan performs poorly when its population size is taken into account and it is compared to other OECD countries. The total number of ARWU Top-500 Universities per million inhabitants is 0.4 for OECD countries compared to only 0.2 for Japan