Times Higher Education (THE) have just published the latest edition of their World Reputation Rankings. At the top, it is business as usual. We have the big six super brands, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Stanford, Cambridge, and Berkeley. After that there are no real surprises, The top fifty includes Ivy League schools like Princeton and Yale, rising Asian giants like Tsinghua, Tokyo and the National University of Singapore, established European institutions like LMU Munich and KU Leuven, and well-known London colleges, LSE and UCL.
But then things start to get interesting. THE has introduced some drastic methodological changes, and these have led to a significant amount of churning.
A bit of context, last year, the reputation rankings recorded an apparently remarkable achievement by nine Arab universities that came into the top 200 from nowhere. Later, THE announced that they had discovered a "syndicate" that was trading votes in the reputation surveys and that measures would be taken to stop that and penalise the universities involved.
But THE was not satisfied with that, and they have revamped its methodology to include two new metrics in addition to the simple counting of votes for best universities for teaching and research.
The first of these is pairwise comparison. This means, according to THE, that universities are preselected "informed from their publication history," and respondents then place them in order from 1 to 5, thus encouraging them to consider places other than the super brands. Exactly how that preselection works is not clear.
The second is voter diversity, which rewards universities if they have more countries and more subjects in their respondent base, which, THE claims, indicates a strong reputation.
Whatever THE's intentions, the overall result of these changes is clear. The USA, UK, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland have all increased the number of universities in the top 200.
The biggest gainers are the UK, which has increased its representation in the top 200 from 20 to 24; Switzerland, which has gone from 4 to 7; and the Netherlands, which has also added another three universities.
Of the twenty British universities in the top 200, eleven have risen, seven are in the same rank or band, and only two, Birmingham and Sheffield, have fallen. It is hard to believe that there has been such a widespread improvement in the international reputation of British universities.
In contrast, the new methodology has been disastrous for universities in China, Russia, the Arab region, India, Israel, Japan, and South Korea.
The number of Chinese universities in the top 200 has fallen from 15 to 8. While Tsinghua and Peking Universities have retained their places, others have fallen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 43rd place to 58th, the University of Science and Technology China from 61-70 to 101-150, and Harbin Institute of Technology from 101-125 to 201-300.
Russia has fared even worse. There were six greyed-out Russian universities in the 2023 rankings. Now, there are just two, Lomonosov Moscow State University, in 83rd place, down from 34th, and Bauman Moscow State Technical University, down from 60-70 to 201-300. The latter gets 1.7 points in the pairwise comparison. All of the others are gone.
In 2023, there were four Indian universities in the rankings, the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institutes of Technology Bombay, Delhi, and Madras. Now, IIT Bombay has been removed altogether, and the Indian Institute of Science and the IITs Delhi and Madras have been demoted to the 201-300 band. They are joined by Siksha 'O' Anuhandsan, which has a global research rank of 1900 in the US News Best Global Universities.
The worst-hit area is the Arab Region. Universities in Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have left. The only Arab university now is King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which does not teach undergraduates.
A glimpse of the impact of the new metrics can be seen by looking at the universities that come at the bottom for each metric.
For voter counts, the ten worst universities are all European, followed by a handful of Australian and Canadian universities and Siksha 'O' Anuhandsan, suggesting that it is the new indicators that keep them in the ranking.
For pairwise comparison, the bottom is quite diverse; there is Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Liverpool University, the University of Buenos Aires, Beijing Normal Univerity, Universite Paris Cite, and the University of Cape Town.
The universities that do worst for voter diversity are mainly South Korean, Indian, Turkish, and Japanese.
It seems then that one function of the new methodology is to slow down the advance of Asian universities and maintain the status of the Western elite.
