Penn is No. 16 in new reputation rankings

Penn has been ranked 16th based on its scholarly reputation around the world by Times Higher Education.

Times Higher Education, a weekly magazine in the United Kingdom that focuses on higher education, released universal rankings this year based on the “reputation” of an institution. In these new reputation-based rankings Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Columbia are all ranked above Penn.

With the publication of these rankings, some students are skeptical about these results and about university rankings in general, including College and Wharton junior Amos Leow.

“I’ve realized how incredibly subjective these rankings are in methodology,” he said. “What they value may not be what I value as a student, which is also again inherently subjective. At the end of the day, what is the real difference between fifth and 10th place? In my opinion it’s all pretty redundant once you get above a certain point.”

The methodology used to evaluate schools on “reputation” stems mostly from an invitation-only survey sent to scholars around the world. More than 10,000 responses from 133 countries were aggregated in a ranking that combined data points on the overall esteem of these institutions, as well as data on the schools’ reputations for research and teaching. The survey was sent evenly across academic disciplines.

In the survey, scholars were asked to name no more than 15 of the top universities in their field, based solely upon their experience; this is in contrast to the more traditional rankings of universities, whose criteria include research output, citations of publications and international outlook.

Other students remained unfazed by these rankings.

“There’s so many different rankings that come out all the time, so it’s hard to keep track of the criteria for each one and where Penn ranks, but it’s cool to see that we are always close to the top,” College sophomore Kyle McKee said.

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