World Reputation Rankings 2025: top universities by prestige

Explore the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings 2025, revealing the top universities for academic reputation and prestige globally. This year, we have ranked 300 institutions from 38 countries and territories using a revamped methodology.

Highlights in the World Reputation Rankings 2025

• Harvard remains number one for the 14th consecutive year and is joint top for a new voter diversity measure (with Oxford and Cambridge), reaffirming its status as the most prestigious college in the US
• Oxford is now joint second – the highest position for a UK institution since 2015
• Tsinghua maintains eighth position globally for academic reputation
• LMU Munich, KU Leuven, Sorbonne University, the University of Melbourne, University of Hong Kong and University of Manchester all join the top 50 most powerful university brands
• Ten new countries feature since last year
• Four new countries make their World Reputation Rankings debut: Chile, Malaysia, Poland and Portugal
• Revamped methodology provides deeper insights than ever before into university prestige worldwide

Explore the table below to discover the full ranking and how universities around the world are performing this year.

The table can be ordered by overall or pillar scores, and filtered by country.

Now in its 14th year, the 2025 edition of the ranking is based on six performance indicators for the first time, to provide a more robust assessment of reputation and reflect the fact that the subject of reputation is gaining a wider audience among the academic community.

Learn more:

Our detailed methodology is based on:

• The world’s largest invitation-only academic opinion survey, with responses from more than 55,000 scholars globally
• New pairwise comparison measure, inviting voters to consider a wider range of institutions
• New voter diversity measure, rewarding universities that receive votes from a wide range or territories and subject areas

Our analysis examines the latest results in the list of the world's most prestigious universities, and explores why reputation matters. 

To unlock the data behind THE’s rankings and access a range of analytical and benchmarking tools, visit our data and insights page.