For the 11th year in a row, Harvard University, a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leads the World University Reputation Rankings in 2021.
The United Kingdom is the most well-represented country in the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings, with 57 institutions, down from 60 last year.
The World Reputation Rankings 2021, according to the Times Higher Education, are based on the world’s largest invitation-only opinion survey of senior, published academics.
It asks academics to pick no more than 15 universities in their specialty that they believe are the finest for research and teaching.
The rankings put Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, and Stanford University in second, third, and fourth place, respectively.
The University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom came in fifth place out of a total of 25 UK universities in the rankings.
In the rankings, the United Kingdom still has the second-highest number of delegates.
Tsinghua University, a public research university in Beijing and a member of the C9 League of Chinese institutions, which was founded in 1911, rose three places to become the first Chinese university to enter the top ten.
According to THE, the technique was based on a poll that took place between November 2020 and February 2021 and garnered 10,963 responses from 128 nations.
“The best-represented subject was clinical and health (accounting for 16.3 per cent of responses), followed by engineering (15.8 per cent), life sciences (14.9 per cent) and physical sciences (14.2 per cent). Also, well represented were computer science (9.8 per cent), business and economics (8.2 per cent), arts and humanities (7.7 per cent) and social sciences (7.5 per cent). The rest of the responses came from psychology (2.8 per cent), education (2.2 per cent) and law (0.6 per cent).
“However, to ensure that the ranking is representative of the global distribution of scholars, THE’s data team rebalanced the weights to a fixed benchmark. These were as follows: physical sciences (14.6 per cent), clinical and health (14.5 per cent), life sciences (13.4 per cent), business and economics (13.1 per cent), engineering (12.7 per cent), arts and humanities (12.5 per cent), social sciences (8.9 per cent), computer science (4.2 per cent), education (2.6 per cent), psychology (2.6 per cent) and law (0.9 per cent).
“We have also maintained a fair distribution of survey responses across the regions.
“A total of 39.1 per cent of responses hail from the Asia-Pacific region. The rest of the responses break down as follows: Western Europe accounted for 24.3 per cent, North America for 21.7 per cent, Eastern Europe for 6.3 per cent, Latin America for 4.2 per cent, the Middle East for 2.4 per cent and Africa for 2 per cent.
“Where countries were over-or under-represented, THE’s data team weighted the responses to more closely reflect the actual geographical distribution of scholars based on UN data,” THE said.
The report added that the “World Reputation Rankings 2021 reveal how universities’ response to the pandemic may have started to shift scholars’ views of the best universities for teaching and research”, saying the full impact remains to be seen.
Other countries that featured on the World Reputation Rankings 2021 included Japan, Canada, Israel, Russian Federation, Ireland, Austria, Sweden, Canada, Singapore Italy, Norway, South Korea and Belgium.
No University on the African continent is featured on the table.
