Baty noted that China’s Tsinghua University and Peking University both leapfrogged the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University in the table this year, while the University of Tokyo now has a stronger reputation than Columbia University. Meanwhile Seoul National University is now considered more prestigious than the University of California, Davis.
Overall, 20 of the US’s 42 representatives have declined since last year and only eight have improved; the rest are stagnant.
“Despite these movements, the relative prestige of the US’s top six university brands has not changed, with Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton and Yale all claiming the same positions in the overall top 8 as last year,” he continued. “The University of Chicago joins the top 10 for the first time at ninth.”
Baty also mentioned that “the situation is not much rosier in Canada. Although the country’s three leading institutions remain in the list, they have all lost ground; Toronto has slipped one place to 24th, while British Columbia and McGill have each dropped three places to 40th and joint 42nd respectively.”
The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings: Top 30 (Copyright Times Higher Education 2017) (Read the full results and analysis here):
| Reputation rank 2017 | Reputation rank 2016 | Institution | Country |
| 1 | 1 | Harvard University | United States |
| 2 | 2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | United States |
| 3 | 3 | Stanford University | United States |
| =4 | 4 | University of Cambridge | United Kingdom |
| =4 | 5 | University of Oxford | United Kingdom |
| 6 | 6 | University of California, Berkeley | United States |
| 7 | 7 | Princeton University | United States |
| 8 | 8 | Yale University | United States |
| 9 | 11 | University of Chicago | United States |
| 10 | 10 | California Institute of Technology | United States |
| 11 | 12 | University of Tokyo | Japan |
| 12 | 9 | Columbia University | United States |
| 13 | 13 | University of California, Los Angeles | United States |
| 14 | 18 | Tsinghua University | China |
| 15 | 14 | University of Michigan | United States |
| 16 | 20 | University College London | United Kingdom |
| 17 | 21 | Peking University | China |
| 18 | 15 | Imperial College London | United Kingdom |
| 19 | 16 | University of Pennsylvania | United States |
| 20 | 24 | London School of Economics and Political Science | United Kingdom |
| 21 | 22 | Johns Hopkins University | United States |
| 22 | 19 | ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich | Switzerland |
| 23 | 17 | Cornell University | United States |
| 24 | 23 | University of Toronto | Canada |
| =25 | 27 | Kyoto University | Japan |
| =25 | 25 | New York University | United States |
| 27 | 26 | National University of Singapore | Singapore |
| 28 | 28 | Duke University | United States |
| 29 | =35 | University of California, San Diego | United States |
| 30 | =30 | Lomonosov Moscow State University | Russian Federation |
Material from a press release was used in this report.
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