The University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom is the No. 1 institution of higher learning in the world, according to the 2011 listing of the top 300 colleges by QS World University Rankings.

And no wonder. Cambridge graduates have won a total of 61 Nobel Prizes, the most of any university in the world.

Alumni include Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking and John Maynard Keynes.

And here's a fun fact: The webcam was invented at Cambridge!

Coming in a very close second is Harvard University. "The gap between Cambridge and Harvard is very small, but Cambridge's superior student/faculty ratio helped tip the balance," Ben Sowter, QS head of research, said in a news release announcing the results of this 8th annual ranking. "Individual attention is one of the key attractions of the Oxbridge tutorial system."

More than 33,000 academics and 16,000 graduate employers participated in the annual survey.

Six of the top 10 and 13 of the top 20 colleges are in the United States. Seventy U.S. schools made the total list.

The top 10 universities in the QS World University Rankings are:
1. University of Cambridge (United Kingdom)
2. Harvard University (United States)
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States)
4. Yale University (United States)
5. University of Oxford (United Kingdom)
6. Imperial College London (United Kingdom)
7. University College London (United Kingdom)
8. University of Chicago (United States)
9. University of Pennsylvania (United States)
10. Columbia University (United States)

QS World University Rankings measure university research quality, graduate employability, teaching commitment and international commitment. QS rankings use a combination of global surveys and audited data including citation counts from Scopus, the world's largest database of academic publishing.

--From the Editors at Netscape