Here's a different ranking of top research universities compiled at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, based on Nobel Laureates, citations, etc. (This is not a list of most desirable undergraduate colleges—it includes entities like Rockefeller U. that don't have undergrad colleges.)

In 2007, The top 20 included 17 American colleges, Oxford, Cambridge, and the U. of Tokyo at #20. The highest continental European university (ETH Zurich) was at #27, the highest French college was at #39, and the highest German school at #53. No Chinese or Indian universities are in the top 100 on this Chinese list.

This Chinese list seems less chauvinistically biased than the London Times rankings I cited in tonight's VDARE article (Harvard #1 in both, but Stanford is #2 on the Chinese list vs. #19 on the English list, behind a number of obscure provincial colleges in England). Because it's a better list, it supports the point I made in VDARE even more strongly than the previous list did: that America's exclusive universities are now enormously prestigious relative to Germany's and the rest of the world's.

German colleges that would have dominated the list 100 years ago have been hit hard by sincere, leftist anti-elitism. The same thing happened to most French universities after 1968, except for some small Ecoles. In contrast, CCNY, which famously shifted to open admissions with disastrous effects, is close to the exception that proves the rule that American colleges largely ignored their own leftist rhetoric and refused to follow their European counterparts into egalitarian anti-exclusivity.