ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan is rated one of the top 18 universities in the world and was the highest ranked U.S. public university in the new 2008 World University Rankings released today.

Since 2004, the London-based Times Higher Education magazine and QS Quacquarelli Symonds have ranked the world’s top 200 higher education institutions based on a formula that includes a peer review survey of 6,000 academics, more than 2,000 recruiters and several other measures such as research, international orientation, the number of academic papers cited and staff-to-student ratios.

U-M was one of 13 U.S. universities making the top 20, a list that also included 11 private U.S. universities: Harvard University, Yale University, CalTech, the University of Chicago, MIT, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University and Stanford University.

U-M rose from 38th in the 2007 survey to 18th in the 2008 survey.

The United States again had the most universities of any nation on the list, with 58 of the top 200 universities while 29 were from the United Kingdom, 12 were in Canada and 9 were in Australia. Thirty-two nations around the world had at least one university on the list.

“Governments all over the world want top universities because they drive economic growth and innovation,” said Ann Mroz, editor of Times Higher Education. “They also promote a country’s cultural values around the world. These rankings measure universities’ international impact among other academics and employers, and their ability to attract the best staff and students from around the world.”

Editors of Times Higher Education, which has covered higher education since 1971, said the rankings have been especially important beyond the United States, where dozens of universities, especially in Asia, have altered strategies with the goal of making an appearance in the rankings. Mroz said Germany is now putting more money into a smaller number of research universities in the hope of increasing their world standing.

The full rankings