The Times Higher Education last month released its 2014 Word Reputation Rankings, with Harvard in the top spot, as it has been every year since the rankings were first released in 2011. In fact, the remainder of the top six institutions—MIT, Stanford, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and UC Berkeley—have also topped the list each year since its inception, with some jockeying for position from year to year.
At its essence, the list is truly a brand ranking, based solely on opinion-based data gathered from a survey of published academics, who are asked to name top teaching and research institutions in their disciplines. While paired with other objective indicators of THE’s annual World University Rankings, the reputation data are isolated and released separately each year in to provide a measure of an institutional esteem. That the same six institutions have topped the list each year is therefore not surprising—as Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, points out in THE’s analysis of the findings, “reputations take time to build up and generally stick unless there is some kind of crisis.”
But if purely subjective, why do these perceptions matter? “Such opinion,” argues THE, is increasingly important and has real-word consequences” in today’s higher ed market. Reputation scores provide a measure of visibility, and visibility helps institutions attract top talent (students and faculty), funding, and philanthropic giving.
