American students looking for a great university with that new college smell, they might want to look outside the United States. According to Higher Education magazine, only two of the top 10 colleges and universities founded in the past 50 years are located in the United States. The top new institution is the Pohang University of Science and Technology, located in South Korea. Lausanne Federal Tech in Switzerland and Hong Kong’s University of Science and Technology were slotted second and third. The top new U.S. school was the University of California at Irvine. “Some institutions have managed to achieve in a matter of years what the traditional elite universities have developed over many generations,” said Phil Baty, editor for the London-based Higher Education magazine. “The landscape is changing quickly, and the old global hierarchies cannot rest on their laurels.”

Fear not: While the best newest universities may be booming abroad, the best overall schools are still old stalwarts such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale, along with England’s Cambridge and Oxford. “Our system is simply much more mature than most on the list,” says Philip Altbach, director of Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education. “Our higher education system has sufficient capacity and probably enough top universities…and state governments have cut spending on higher education by 25 percent in the past decade or so. There is quite literally no money or energy for new public higher education institutions.” (Washington Times)