University named best place to work in academia

“Both Princeton University and Max Planck’s academics rank their institutions highly,” the Scientist said in a statement. “Princeton’s strengths include peers and teaching and mentoring, while Max Planck’s positives include team building, infrastructure and environment.”

Princeton rose to the top spot after placing second in the Scientist rankings last year behind the J. David Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco. In 2007, Princeton did not rank in the top 15.

Princeton was the only Ivy League university to be named one of the top 15 U.S. institutions. UC-San Francisco ranked second, followed by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, the University of Oklahoma, Emory University, J. David Gladstone Institutes, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation in Ardmore, Ok., and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Coming in 11th was the Trudeau Institute in Saranac Lake, N.Y., followed by the University of Pittsburgh, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, the Medical College of Georgia and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

Last year, the survey concluded that Princeton’s strengths were teaching and mentoring, as well as infrastructure and environment. Its weaknesses were listed as job satisfaction and pay.

Earlier this month, Princeton placed eighth in the Times Higher Education (THE) magazine worldwide rankings of universities.

THE named Harvard the best educational institute in the world for the sixth straight year, followed by the University of Cambridge, Yale and University College London. Imperial College London and University of Oxford tied for fifth, while the University of Chicago came in just ahead of Princeton in seventh place.

In August, U.S. News & World Report also released its list of America’s best colleges and universities, on which Princeton shared the top spot with Harvard. Princeton has been ranked as the top college in America for nine of the past 10 years by U.S. News & World Report.

Yale was third on that list, while Penn, Stanford, MIT and the California Institute of Technology all shared the fourth spot. Columbia and the University of Chicago were tied for eighth place, while Duke University rounded out the top 10.