Imperial ranked the 3rd most prestigious uni in Britain

Imperial has been named the university with the 3rd best reputation in the UK, and the 15th best in the world.

This puts us down one place on last year’s rankings, which was down one from the year before.

This latest Times Higher Education rankings system is based on reputation, which is separate to their world university rankings, in which Imperial places 8th in the world and 3rd in the UK.

As usual, Imperial’s British rivals were Cambridge and Oxford, who came 4th and 5th for reputation in the world respectively, which is down two places each on the year before. They came after Harvard, MIT and Stanford this year. Interestingly, Cambridge beat Oxford for reputation, despite the fact that in the actual world rankings, not based on perception, Oxford still trumps Cambridge.

Arguably, a university’s brand is important for attracting the world’s best students and researchers, and employers’ perception of a university is just as important when you’re trying to get a job after graduating.

Although British universities are well-represented, Durham and Bristol had both disappeared from the top 100. UCL came in just behind us at 20th. Asian universities saw the most dramatic improvement in rankings, with the University of Tokyo beating Imperial in 12th place.

The rankings were created after quizzing a panel of 10,000 academics from several different countries, making judgements on the reputation of each university. The placing relied on these academics’ perception of each university’s teaching and research. Each academic surveyed was asked to name up to 15 universities that they thought were the best in both research and teaching. Scores for these two categories were then combined at 2:1 (research:teaching) to give an overall score for each institution. Each score was then compared to the most commonly named college (Harvard) to create a ranking.