Oct 04, 2014 05:04 AM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

The California Institute of Technology has secured the top spot in the list of world rankings by the Times Higher Education for the fourth consecutive time.

Thomas Rosenbaum, president of Caltech, was pleased with the Pasadena University's ranking. Caltech has given 33 Nobel Laureates in the past 91 years. The school is known to encourage research of new fields in science and engineering, and pushing interdisciplinary boundaries in the service of discovery.

"It also points to the competitive nature of higher education, where maintaining a culture of intellectual risk taking is essential to attract the most creative and original scholars, scholars who have choices among many exceptional academic institutions across the world," Rosenbaum said, Pasadena Star News reports.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2014-2015 by Thomson Reuters uses 13 performance indicators to determine the top universities including teaching, international outlook, industry income, research and citations.

Caltech is followed by one of the prestigious Ivy League School in the world, Harvard. Over 58 percent of Harvard full-time undergraduates are eligible for some kind of need-based financial aid and the average need-based scholarship or grant award is $44,781. The school's tuition and fees for the 2014-15 academic year was $43,938. The average cost of tuition for students after receiving grants based on need was $15,169.

At No: 3 is Oxford University. Oxford comprises of many notable alumni, including 27 Nobel laureates (58 total affiliations), 26 British Prime Ministers (most recently David Cameron) and many foreign heads of state.

Stanford follows Oxford in the fourth position. Even though some of Stanford students quit midway through their college, they went on to establish some of the world's most successful companies. Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Yahoo's Jerry Yang and David Filo and Snapchat's Evan Spiegel are some of the school's famous dropouts.

Top 10 World Universities

1. California Institute of Technology (US)

2. Harvard University (US)

3. University of Oxford (UK)

4. Stanford University (US)

5. University of Cambridge (UK)

6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)

7. Princeton University (US)

8. University of California - Berkeley (US)

9. Imperial College London (UK)

10. Yale University (US)

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