U.S. Universities Dominate Global Ranking, But Their Reputation Slips

U.S. universities continue to be the dominant players among the world’s best universities, but their overall reputation has declined in recent years. That’s a main takeaway from the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2025.

THE’s rankings are generally regarded as being one of the most comprehensive evaluations of higher education institutions across the world. This year, it ranked 2,092 institutions in 115 countries and territories. adding 185 new entries over last year.

For the ninth straight year, the University of Oxford takes the top spot. The rest of the top 10, in order were:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Harvard University

Princeton University

University of Cambridge

Stanford University

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California Institute of Technology

University of California, Berkeley

Imperial College London

Yale University

In addition to placing 7 universities in the top-10 tier, the U.S. had 55 institutions ranked in the top 200, 38 in the top 100, 23 in the top 50, and 16 in the top 25 (including, in order, the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, University of California Los Angeles, Cornell University, University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Washington).

THE’s methodology uses 18 measures grouped into five areas to rank institutions: teaching (the learning environment); research environment (volume, income and reputation); research quality (citation impact, research strength, research excellence and research influence); international outlook (staff, students and research); and industry (income and patents).

THE’s own analysis reveals that the reputations of institutions in the U.S. and the UK are declining in both teaching and research. To gauge reputation, THE asks a sample of scholars worldwide to name up to 15 universities that they think were the best in the world for both research and teaching in their fields.

U.S. institutions claimed 36.3% of the share of votes for teaching and 38.1% for research, down from 44.2% and 46.5% respectively in 2015, with the biggest drop occurring in the last five years. In just the past year alone, there was a 4% drop in the U.S.’s share of votes for teaching and a 3% decline for research.

UK institutions now take 13% of the share of votes for teaching and 12.8% for research, showing a decline across the past decade from 18.9% and 18.1% respectively.

Why are these decreases taking place? THE suggested one reason is “that the reputation survey has expanded in recent years, with scholars from more countries participating, leading to a broader distribution of votes.”

However, it also pointed to a funding decline as a contributor to the UK’s slide as well as gains made by universities in other countries. Universities outside the US and UK received 51% of the vote share for teaching and 49% for research, significant increases from 37% and 35%, respectively, ten ago.

China, France and Germany made notable gains. Chinese universities now take 7.7% of the vote share for teaching, up from 2.7% a decade ago, and 7.3% of the research reputation vote share compared with 2.2% in 2015.

“With US universities dominating the top 10 there is intense competition with the country’s elite institutions jockeying for position with relatively significant rises and falls in the top ten,” said Phil Baty, of Times Higher Education, in a news release. “While the reputation of US universities is the highest in the world, amongst academics, its decline over recent years has been quite significant and its global reputation is at a record low with US global reputation for excellence and prestige in major, steady global decline.”