There's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a

There's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a while, but US universities held all but 2 positions in the top twenty (Cambridge and Oxford were the only non-US universities). Research is not the same as learning, but its probably as good a proxy as we've got. Journal publishing and citations are heavily based on social networks and the intricacies of the modern grant system. I really wouldn't trust citations to be a good indicator of research or advancement. A better thing to look at would be the flow of real world improvements that come out of a universities research. Unfortunately, there is no systematic measurement of that flow.