據新加坡《聯合早報》報導，《新聞周刊》是以上海交通大學高等教育研究所和英國《泰晤士報》的高等教育增刊的大學排名標準作為參考，為各大名校打分綜合得出自己的排名。其中50%的分數來自上海交通大學的排行榜標準，交大的排行榜主要是以學術為指標，標準包括：教員與研究員的素質、研究成果，其中發表於《自然》與《科學》雜誌的論文數目和收錄於科學引文索引擴展版和社會科學引文索引的論文篇數。另外40%的分數則來自英國《泰晤士報》的高等教育增刊選大學的標準，如國際教員比例、國際學生比例、論文被引用比例以及師生比例等。最後的10%分數，則取決於大學圖書館的藏書量。

1. Harvard University

2. Stanford University

3. Yale University

4. California Institute of Technology

5. University of California at Berkeley

6. University of Cambridge

7. Massachusetts Institute Technology

8. Oxford University

9. University of California at San Francisco

10. Columbia University

11. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

12. University of California at Los Angeles

13. University of Pennsylvania

14. Duke University

15. Princeton Universitty

16. Tokyo University

17. Imperial College London

18. University of Toronto

19. Cornell University

20. University of Chicago

21. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich

22. University of Washington at Seattle

23. University of California at San Diego

24. Johns Hopkins University

25. University College London

26. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne

27. University Texas at Austin

28. University of Wisconsin at Madison

29. Kyoto University

30. University of Minnesota Twin Cities

31. University of British Columbia

32. University of Geneva

33. Washington University in St. Louis

34. London School of Economics

35. Northwestern University

36. National University of Singapore

37. University of Pittsburgh

38. Australian National University

39. New York University

40. Pennsylvania State University

41. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

42. McGill University

43. Ecole Polytechnique

44. University of Basel

45. University of Maryland

46. University of Zurich

47. University of Edinburgh

48. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

49. University of Bristol

50. University of Sydney

51. University of Colorado at Boulder

52. Utrecht University

53. University of Melbourne

54. University of Southern California

55. University of Alberta

56. Brown University

57. Osaka University

58. University of Manchester

59. University of California at Santa Barbara

60. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

61. Wageningen University

62. Michigan State University

63. University of Munich

64. University of New South Wales

65. Boston University

66. Vanderbilt University

67. University of Rochester

68. Tohoku University

69. University of Hong Kong

70. University of Sheffield

71. Nanyang Technological University

72. University of Vienna

73. Monash University

74. University of Nottingham

75. Carnegie Mellon University

76. Lund University

77. Texas A&M University

78. University of Western Australia

79. Ecole Normale Super Paris

80. University of Virginia

81. Technical University of Munich

82. Hebrew University of Jerusalem

83. Leiden University

84. University of Waterloo

85. King's College London

86. Purdue University

87. University of Birmingham

88. Uppsala University

89. University of Amsterdam

90. University of Heidelberg

91. University of Queensland

92. University of Leuven

93. Emory University

94. Nagoya University

95. Case Western Reserve University

96. Chinese University of Hong Kong

97. University of Newcastle

98. Innsbruck University

99. University of Massachusetts at Amherst

100. Sussex University