Here are world's most admired universities

Havard University in the United States remains the best global university according to the Times Higher Education (THE) World Reputation Rankings 2015. The rankings which employ the world’s largest invitation-only academic opinion survey provide the list of the top 100 most powerful global university brands.

Havard is followed by the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University in the second, third, fourth and fifth positions respectively. They are followed by the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton, Yale and California Institute of Technology with Columbia University coming in at position ten. While Harvard is still at the top, two British schools, Cambridge and Oxford, have pushed MIT and Stanford out of the number two and three 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, 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 realised 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. 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.”

Reputation ranking

The same goes for students, he says. “Reputation often comes out as the number one factor that students use to decide where they want to go to school.” 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, US institutions dominate the list, taking 43 of the top 100.

Some US public schools, suffering from funding cuts, have fallen. 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.

Asia had 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.

-Forbes and Agencies