Harvard is still on top, but two British schools, Cambridge and Oxford, have pushed MIT and Stanford out of the No. 2 and 3 slots. Still, American institutions dominate the ranks of the most admired universities in the world, according to a list just released by Times Higher Education (THE), a London magazine that tracks the higher education market.
THE also produces a more established list, the World University Ranking, which it has been putting together for the past 11 years, where it uses 13 different metrics, from the number of academic citations schools receive to the percentage of their faculty members with PhDs. But THE rankings editor Phil Baty explains that five years ago, he and his colleagues realized that it could also be meaningful to look purely at reputation. So THE decided to poll senior, published professors at universities in more than 100 countries around the world. It asked them to do one thing: Nominate 10 or fewer institutions in their field which they considered to have the best departments in their area of study. Then THE took the data and divided it into six disciplines: social sciences, engineering, technology, physical sciences, medicine and life sciences, and arts and humanities, and did its tally from there.
“This is purely subjective data,” explains Baty. “It’s completely based on opinion. But it’s opinion from the people whose opinions really count.”
Why is reputation so important? “Reputation is almost like the currency of higher education,” he says. “It’s the way scholars decide whom to do business with, whom to collaborate with and where they’ll go for their next career move.” The same goes for students, he says. “Reputation often comes out as the No. 1 factor that students use to decide where they want to go to school.”
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Of course there is something circular about college rankings. If a school comes out on top of the U.S. News ranking, or the Forbes ranking for that matter, it enhances the public perception of that school, which then ups the number of applicants and the quality of students the school can accept. It’s interesting to note that Forbes ranks Harvard down at No. 7, while Stanford is No. 2 (after Williams, which didn’t qualify for THE’s list because it’s a college, not a university), and MIT is close to THE’s ranking at No. 5 (No. 2 among U.S. schools). As our readers know, Forbes ranks only U.S. institutions and we use a unique set of criteria including grads’ salaries as calculated by PayScale, faculty comments on RateMyProfessor.com, number of graduates who have landed in Who’s Who and four-year graduation rates. But arguably THE’s reputation ranking is more serious than other ratings since it’s entirely the result of a poll of scholars. This year’s ranking is based on 10,500 responses from published senior academics who reported an average of 15 years working in higher education.
Though Cambridge and Oxford moved up this year, as in previous years, U.S. institutions dominate the list, taking 26 of the top 50 places and 43 of the top 100.
Some U.S. public schools, suffering from funding cuts, have fallen. UCLA is out of the top 10, at 14th place, while the University of Michigan slid from 15th to 19th. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign dropped from 23rd to 30th and the University of Wisconsin-Madison fell 10 places to 38th and the University of Texas at Austin slipped from 33rd to 46th.
Mexico is on the list for the first time this year with the National Autonomous University of Mexico scoring in the 71-80 band (after 50th place THE ranks in bands of 10).
Asia has mixed results compared to last year, with three Japanese institutions, Osaka University, the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Tohoku University falling off the list entirely. University of Tokyo is still Asia’s top school, in 12th place. Two Chinese schools, Tsinghua University and Peking University, are up.
Here are the top 10 most admired universities:
1. Harvard
2. University of Cambridge
3. University of Oxford
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
5. Stanford
6. University of California, Berkeley
7. Princeton
8. Yale
9 California Institute of Technology
10. Columbia University
Check out our slide show above for a list of the top 20 most admired universities. For THE’s complete list of 100, click here.
