The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings is released

Gap beyween UK Universities and the UK "Golden Triangle" widens

The University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford have been bumped down a place in the 2014 World Reputation University Rankings. With Harvard and MIT managing to maintain their first and second place, Stanford University knocked Cambridge off the number three spot, pushing Oxford to number five. The US clearly dominates the rankings with seven of the top 10 places being taken by American Institutions. You can see the full table at the Times Higher Education

The overall scores here (the dark blue bars in the RH column) look weird.

Harvard (rank 1) gets 100 - full marks
Oxford (rank 5) gets 67.8 - only 2/3rds as good
Imperial (rank 13) gets 20.9 - 1/5th as good
LSE (rank 25) gets 11.8 - lets be generous and say 1/8th as good
Carnegie Mellon (rank 29) the first in single figures with a score of 9.6
the last uni with a published score is Osaka (rank 50) with a measly 5.7 points

scores for 51-100 are 'data withheld', possibly someone realised it looked silly to have 50 unis splitting the remaining range of marks between 5.7 and 0 out of 100

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the methodology is to ask selected academics to list upto 15 universities they think are good, regional rep rings are going to flourish whether or not they're being orchestrated

This is right. Beyond the top 50 or so, the number of academics required to list a university as one of their 15 is so vanishingly small that rankings can be massively affected by a local chauvinism.

The top (i.e. most often) listed school, this year it is Harvard, is given a score of 100.0 and all other scores are adjusted against this. That is to say that Oxford was listed not by 68% of respondents but by 68% as many respondents as listed Harvard.

Let's suppose that fully half of those responding included Harvard in their listings. And absent the data I think that's an erring on the side of generosity - bear in mind that academics are allowed to list only in their own subjects and Harvard has no provision in inter alia Geography or Social Work. The survey question "I would send my students to graduate work in X at Y" requires that X is taught at Y. And in some subjects US academics in their fields know that Harvard is not top 15 even nationally.

So, if it is 9000 of the 18000 responding plumping for Harvard, then it's about 5,500 listing Oxford (i.e. 60% of 9000). By the time we get to the last one for which the data is revealed, the number 50 ranked school, Osaka University in Japan, with 5.7% as many mentions as Harvard, the number of mentions can be supposed as approximately 500.

My strong suspicion is that responses from Japanese academics were about 500 as well*. Of course, none of them had to suggest Osaka as better than Harvard, the survey asks for only 15 names with no sense of their being ordered. So, 12 from overseas and a cheeky 3 from Japan will be fine. But it will mean as well that Osaka University is listed as number 50 in the world "for international reputation" despite being mentioned exclusively by Japanese.


*Another Fermi calculation would support this as likely the case: 500 is 1/36th of the respondents, which is about as much representation as Japan would be anticipated as having in a survery appropriately distributed.

It's not "Times Higher Education University Global Rankings" but "The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings", based on a survey among scholars worldwide asking "Which universities do scholars think are the best on the planet?".

World Reputation Rankings 2014 methodology

As research lab rankings, I think it's a fine list.
It's interesting that tiny specialist universities like LBS and LSHTM are still reputed among scholars (they are exceptionally good in their fields though).

These league tables really should come with a massive health warning for anyone who is currently choosing a university - they have big limitations, which are explained rather well here http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1096372

The other reason why this table is sensible is that it doesnt change that much year-on-year. In reality, the quality of a university changes very slowly over time, so the tables which claim to have universities dropping/gaining 10 places in less than a year are generally stupid, since these big drops/gains are just usually a result of changes made to the weighting function (which shows how non-robust the whole process is).

Well, if you re-sort any national rankings by entrance difficulty, the ranking order is almost the same every year.

THE reputation rankings seem reasonable to some degree from the viewpoint of research standards of universities. But we never know who voted and how much they answered seriously. I'm more than sure that there are many patriots who anyway vote the universities in their countries or/and their own universities, because university staffs are not saints. (In fact, it seems several EA universities are overrated than their actual citation index scores for me.) So I take them with a pinch of salt as usual.

I think east asian unis being on the list just reflects reality in those countries. You have to remember that Peking and Tsinghua Universities are the equivalent of Oxbridge for China, a country of 1.4 billion people, and as we know, Chinese people are very focused on education, they are extremely competitive to the point that it makes sense their reputation is high. What really pulls them back on the world rankings are citations, and because the language of research is English, there is a massive bias towards English speaking countries. Its difficult for a Chinese university that teaches in Chinese to have many professors who can publish a paper in English and this goes for every non english country in the world.


Look at where most of the world's universities on the top 100 Times list are. The vast majority are English speaking universities. The world reputation reflects reality much more. If rankings reflected student capability and intelligence, the UK would have only Oxbridge in the top 100 because there is an ocean of talent that is not accounted for all around the world that is not recognized because most world rankings rely on research which is written mainly in English.

According to THE, there are 10,536 responses in this year (eng 22% phy 18%, med 16%, life 13%, soc 22% and art 9%).

If rankings reflected student capability and intelligence, the UK would have only Oxbridge in the top 100

I do not know whether engineers are just good at completing surveys, but the make up of responses is not reflective of the composition of faculty in western countries (possibly Germany excepted).

Ultimately you get a Korean engineer's view of the best universities. That Korean engineer is only commenting on his own discipline but what it means is that those US universities with a strong engineering faculty are getting a block vote.

Arts, and to a lesser degree social sciences, travel poorly due to cultural and linguistic factors.

If you are a researcher in English local history, you will neither know nor care where the best research is being undertaken on Portuguese local history.

We study the literature of our own language in literature departments but generally we study the literature of other languages in foreign language departments. If you ask an American professor of Italian what are the best universities for the study of Italian, he may not name any university in Italy although almost certainly the best work on Italian literature is undertaken in Italian universities.

My guess is that possibly Harvard aside, there would be no congruity between the opinions of an American and a Spanish legal academic as to which were the best universities for law.

Interestingly no Russian university made the list at all but equally interestingly Russian was the one major teaching language in which the survey was not distributed.

This is undeniable evidence of how some universities reputations is not warranted.

For instance, Manchester and KCL are considered inferior in the UK to universities like bath and Warwick, Durham is seen as a 3rd rival to Oxbridge.

I hope that people realise just what they're buying into when applying to universities, and not buying into the reputation that can often fool.

tldr: Durham is ****. This proves it.

Slight exaggeration don't you think! What about Cambridge, Imperial college, UCL, LSE? I certainly wouldn't say the students there are less intelligent or less capable than the students at Oxford.

This is undeniable evidence of how some universities reputations is not warranted.

For instance, Manchester and KCL are considered inferior in the UK to universities like bath and Warwick, Durham is seen as a 3rd rival to Oxbridge.

I hope that people realise just what they're buying into when applying to universities, and not buying into the reputation that can often fool.

tldr: Durham is ****. This proves it.

This is undeniable evidence of how some universities reputations is not warranted.

For instance, Manchester and KCL are considered inferior in the UK to universities like bath and Warwick, Durham is seen as a 3rd rival to Oxbridge.

I hope that people realise just what they're buying into when applying to universities, and not buying into the reputation that can often fool.

tldr: Durham is ****. This proves it.