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The University of Oxford has retained the number one spot in the ����Vlog World University Rankings for a ninth year in a row, but the reputation of the wider UK sector is rapidly eroding, with a similar trend seen in the US.

Oxford’s reign is now the longest in the history of the league table, beating Harvard’s eight-year stint which ended in 2011. The institution’s performance has been bolstered by significant improvements in its income from industry and the number of patents that cite its research, as well as its teaching scores.

Compared with other institutions in the top five, Oxford’s international outlook – particularly its proportion of international students and international co-authorship – makes it stand out.

Across the Atlantic, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is now the US’ highest-ranked university, in second place globally, its best-ever performance. It replaces Stanford University, which has dropped from second to sixth, its lowest position since 2010, driven by declining scores for teaching, research environment and international outlook.

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Harvard University has moved from fourth to third place, and Princeton University from sixth to fourth. MIT and Princeton are proving to be dark horses, with the data revealing steady improvements in their positions over the past decade.

World University Rankings 2025: top 10

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But while the top of the ranking is still dominated by US and UK institutions, the data behind it reveals a more worrisome trend: both countries are seeing a rapid decline in their average research and teaching reputation.

The UK’s teaching reputation has dropped by 3 per cent since last year and research reputation by 5 per cent, based on more than 93,000 responses to THE’s Academic Reputation Survey, in which academics choose up to 15 institutions they believe excel in teaching and, separately, research.

UK institutions now take 13 per cent of the share of votes for teaching and 12.8 per cent for research, representing a steady decline over the past decade from 18.9 per cent and 18.1 per cent respectively.

Part of the reason for the drop is that the reputation survey has expanded in recent years, with scholars from more countries participating, leading to a broader distribution of votes. But experts suggested that there were other factors at play, too.

Irene Tracey, Oxford’s vice-chancellor, told THE that the UK’s declining reputation was her biggest concern for the future of the sector, along with the current financial crisis.

“This matters more than maybe people realise. We’ve got to be really mindful of that and mindful of the decisions that need to be taken now in order to address that slippage,” she said, adding that it was important that the UK “has a good slug of our universities in that top batch” of global league tables.

Nick Hillman, director of the ����Vlog Policy Institute, said the decline in teaching reputation was down to underfunding.  

“When you underfund university teaching, as we have been doing, the result is often worse staff-to-student ratios, problems with marking and evaluation and inadequate contact hours or class sizes. If you do this while other countries take the opposite route, your relative position is bound to deteriorate,” he said.

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The reputation of the US sector is also falling. In the past year alone, there has been a��4 per cent drop in the country’s share of votes for teaching and a 3 per cent drop for research. 

US institutions now take 36.3 per cent of the share of votes for teaching and 38.1 per cent for research, down from��44.2 and 46.5 per cent respectively in 2015, with the biggest drop occurring in the past five years.

Meanwhile, universities based outside the US and UK have 51 per cent of the vote share for teaching and 49 per cent for research, up from 37 and 35 per cent respectively a decade ago.

The key countries gaining in esteem are China, France and Germany. Chinese universities now take 7.7 per cent of the vote share for teaching, up from 7.2 per cent last year and 2.7 per cent a decade ago, and 7.3 per cent of the research reputation vote share compared with 2.2 per cent in 2015.

French universities now take 2.9 per cent of the vote share for teaching reputation, a slight drop on last year but representing a steady increase since 2015 when they took 2.4 per cent. Their vote share for research reputation has risen to 2.9 per cent, up from 2.8 last year and 2.1 a decade ago. Germany has also upped its share to 3.9 per cent for teaching reputation and 4.4 per cent for research.

Share of reputation survey votes

Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford, said the trends mainly reflected “other systems coming up than the US and UK declining”.

“One of the longer-term factors is the comparative rise in resources and capability of national systems in Western Europe and East and Southeast Asia. On the whole, Europeanisation – including Bologna-style cooperation and the framework research programmes, such as the current Horizon – have strengthened universities in continental Europe,” he said.

Meanwhile, China’s rise in reputation was “very much driven by increasing levels of government investment”, he added. 

Professor Marginson said that the “intrinsic academic strength” of anglophone countries’ universities “remains strong”. But he warned that “if UK higher education goes another decade without fixing the now bankrupted 2012 funding system, in which it is politically impossible to increase the unit of resource, then it will pay the price in terms of reputation as well as resources”.

Ming Cheng, professor of higher education at Sheffield Hallam University, said she was “disappointed that the UK government is not supporting the sector rigorously, compared with that of some other countries”.

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“University financial difficulties, reduced government funding, capped domestic tuition fees, [an] unfriendly visa system towards international students/academics, academic increased/unreasonable workload, pathetic payment to academics, the fragile relationship between student and academic due to the growing distrust and consumerism culture in the UK are driving the sector into trouble,” she said. “The wall is crumbling.”

rosa.ellis@timeshighereducation.com